Monthly Archive for March, 2011

Charles Dharapak/Associated Press

From Kate Hafner in The New York Times:

Paul Baran, an engineer who helped create the technical underpinnings for the Arpanet, the government-sponsored precursor to today’s Internet, died Saturday night at his home in Palo Alto, Calif. He was 84.

The cause was complications from lung cancer, said his son, David.

In the early 1960s, while working at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, Calif., Mr. Baran outlined the fundamentals for packaging data into discrete bundles, which he called “message blocks.” The bundles are then sent on various paths around a network and reassembled at their destination. Such a plan is known as “packet switching.”

With British scientist Donald Davies and many others, Baran devised the packet-switching technology that is the basis of the modern Internet, thereby helping to bring into being J.C.R. Licklider’s “galactic network”.

For more…

From Calvin Hennick in the Boston Globe:

Harvard University professor Leslie G. Valiant, a pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence, has been awarded the 2010 A.M. Turing Award, the most prestigious prize in the field of computer science. Valiant’s research into processes to make computers reason as humans do laid the groundwork for applications ranging from e-mail spam filters to IBM’s Watson computer system, which last month bested human competitors on the game show “Jeopardy!’’

Artificial intelligence’s original promise was not fulfilled with the speed expected by its early researchers. Skeptical philosophers attacked the very idea of artificial intelligence. Meanwhile, research has continued, and is bearing fruit.

For the Globe article…

For the ACM press release…

From The Economist

The industrial revolution of the late 18th century made possible the mass production of goods, thereby creating economies of scale which changed the economy—and society—in ways that nobody could have imagined at the time. Now a new manufacturing technology has emerged which does the opposite. Three-dimensional printing makes it as cheap to create single items as it is to produce thousands and thus undermines economies of scale. It may have as profound an impact on the world as the coming of the factory did.

It works like this. First you call up a blueprint on your computer screen and tinker with its shape and colour where necessary. Then you press print. A machine nearby whirrs into life and builds up the object gradually, either by depositing material from a nozzle, or by selectively solidifying a thin layer of plastic or metal dust using tiny drops of glue or a tightly focused beam. Products are thus built up by progressively adding material, one layer at a time: hence the technology’s other name, additive manufacturing. Eventually the object in question—a spare part for your car, a lampshade, a violin—pops out. The beauty of the technology is that it does not need to happen in a factory. Small items can be made by a machine like a desktop printer, in the corner of an office, a shop or even a house; big items—bicycle frames, panels for cars, aircraft parts—need a larger machine, and a bit more space.

To Read More…