Innovations » Innovations

Michael Wong: January 14-20

admin — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 17:09:09 +0000

Our next innovator is Michael Wong, a tenured professor of chemical engineering at Rice University.

Kevin Kruse Answers:

admin — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 19:41:22 +0000

Franklin D. Roosevelt. He led the country through two major crises, the Great Depression and World War II, and in so doing thoroughly revolutionized America’s sense of itself, its purpose and its place in the world. FDR’s New Deal not only introduced the welfare state to America and radically changed the scope of government; it also reconfigured American politics, sparking 60 years of debate between those who sought to expand it and those who sought to roll it back.

Kevin Kruse Asks:

admin — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 19:39:36 +0000

Who was the most influential American of the 20th century?

Kevin Kruse: January 7—13

admin — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 19:36:00 +0000

Our next innovator is Kevin Kruse, an associate professor of history at Princeton University. Learn more about Kevin.

Aaron O’Dea Asks:

admin — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 17:13:46 +0000

What can the arts learn from the sciences and visa versa in today’s world?

Aaron O’Dea: January 2-6

admin — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 13:24:11 +0000

Our next innovator is Aaron O’Dea, a paleobiologist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Balboa, Panama. Learn more about Aaron.

Jon Kleinberg Answers:

admin — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 23:08:16 +0000

There are a lot of things I’d like to see. To take one in particular, I’d like to have computers be able to answer my questions—in a real sense, the way people can. With search tools like Google, you get an experience that is both more and less than what you get from talking to a person. True, no human being has instant access to billions of facts—but unlike Google, people can summarize, paraphrase, and draw inferences from what they know; they can tailor their answer to what they think you know; and they can engage in a dialogue when your question is hard to formulate precisely. (Search engines are starting to perform simple approximations to these things—itself an impressive achievement—but they have a long way to go.)

What would it take to replicate all this in a piece of software? This is a major challenge in the field of computer science, and one whose full solution is quite some distance away. Indeed, the British mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing famously posed a version of this challenge in 1950, proposing a useful operational definition for machine intelligence. His proposal, known today as the “Turing Test”, imagines (in contemporary terms) that you are sitting
in front of two instant-messenger windows; in one you can talk to a human being, and in the other you can talk to a computer. If you can’t tell which is which, then the computer can be considered, for all practical purposes, “intelligent”.

It is fascinating, given all the advances in both the science and technology of computing over the past half-century, how prescientTuring was in formulating this challenge: that despite the ability of current computing systems to handle trillions of bytes of data, billions of user queries per day, and computations on massive scales, we still lack the techniques—in automating the processing of human language, synthesizing disparate pieces of knowledge, and drawing
inferences—to replicate the seemingly simple act of keeping up one’s end of a conversation. But if we were to achieve this in a piece of software, and combine it with the massive information resources and instant recall of a Google or a Yahoo!—what a conversation that would be.

Jon Kleinberg Asks:

admin — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 23:05:29 +0000

Despite amazing technological advances, there are many respects in which computing and the Internet are still in their early stages of development. What would you most like computers to be able to do for you that they can’t currently do today?

Jon Kleinberg: December 3-9

admin — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 23:02:41 +0000

Our next innovator is Jon Kleinberg, professor of computer science at Cornell. Learn more about Jon.

Alicia J. Graf Answers:

admin — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 16:31:41 +0000

I remember the first time I ever saw a black ballerina perform. Christina Johnson and Donald Williams of the Dance Theatre of Harlem danced in a summer festival in my hometown, Columbia, MD. I was 12 years old. At the time, I was unaware that stereotypes and prejudices existed in the world of dance. I was just happy to be learning steps and going to performances. However, when I saw Christina Johnson perform Le Corsaire, I realized that this was the first time that I had ever seen a black ballerina in a live performance. I just wasn’t expecting her to be black! I instantly felt a connection to her. I wanted to scream out loud, “Hey everyone! She looks like me!” I had never pictured myself as a REAL ballerina until I had the opportunity to witness her beauty. It was one of the most magical, most self-realizing moments of my adolescent life.