Week 35
07.01.02
It's COMPUTER SCIENCE WEEK at Schism Matrix,
because I just spent about a week in a rural retreat in
northern Virginia with 70 or so of the nation's most
distinguished computer scientists.
http://www.cra.org/Activities/challenges/
Our home away from home.
http://www.airlie.com/
It's not real easy to organize computer scientists. Dr. Anita Jones got to be our
Den Mom.
http://www.cs.virginia.edu/brochure/profs/
jones.html
Here's Dr. Anita at the South Pole, an easy chore by comparison.
http://www.cs.virginia.edu/brochure/
classics.html#anita_south
07.02.02
Prof. Seth Goldstein. He hankers to link up zillions of microscopic objects
"smart dust," "smart paint."
Here's the pitch on a Goldstein project involving "reconfigurable nanotechnology," i.e., a huge
unstable swarm of ubiquitous stuff that just keeps trading data no matter what you do to it.
http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~phoenix/
Of course, this requires some unusual computer architecture.
http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~phoenix/
reconfigurable.html
Check out the weblinks in this course Seth teaches on "electronic
nanotechnology." No more o' that lame sci-fi handwaving nonsense; this
is the hard-case stuff here, folks.
http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/academic/
class/15849c-s02/www/schedule.htm
07.03.02
Robin Murphy is from Florida's "Center for Robot-Assisted Search and
Rescue."
http://www.csee.usf.edu/~murphy/
I'd never allege that the learned Dr. Murphy is "a cool chick with
a hard-as-nails attitude," but she is certainly the toughest-minded
computer scientist I've ever met. She is way on top of her brief, and
she has got disaster-stories like you wouldn't believe.
http://www.csee.usf.edu/robotics/USAR/
faq.html
"135 rescuers died in the Mexico City effort, 65 of them when they got trapped
in a confined space and the area flooded and they couldn't get
out. There's all sorts of other dangers: secondary collapses, like when
the nurse at Oklahoma City fell and died, toxic gases, etc. So lots of
cheap, expendable robots are a solution." Somebody should pry open that
brand-new 9/11 Homeland Defense checkbook and give Dr. Murphy a truckload
o' robo-bucks.
07.04.02
Steve White from IBM Research is into massively distributed systems. "Computing will change
everything on the planet in our lifetime."
http://domino.watson.ibm.com/Comm/
bios.nsf/pages/
4373CE9CF60D9A0F852565950059694D.html
Steve has also got his own blog, called "Plurp."
http://www.stevewhite.org/log/current/
Among other interesting things, Plurp featured this link to a Lovecraftian form
of chess.
http://www.chessvariants.com/other.dir/
nemoroth.html
07.05.02
When it comes to weird, out-there (but reputable and publishable) computer
science, man, nobody beats Jordan Pollack. This guy is the cat's
pyjamas.
http://www.jordanpollack.com/
http://www.cs.brandeis.edu/~pollack/
Check out the videos here and prepare to have your mind blown.
http://www.demo.cs.brandeis.edu/golem/
Bruce Sterling is a science fiction writer and 105% vision thing. He also
talks. For the text of his talk at the CRA, check out Viridian.
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