A CS conference is only as good as its selection of keynote speeches, and SIGCSE 2010 offers a formidable cast of keynotes, including a Nobel Prize winner.  

Cardiff University researchers have developed software that creates audibility maps of proposed room designs that  show hotspots where conversations would be inaudible if the room was noisy.

Tsukuba University engineering students have developed Yotaro, a baby humanoid robot designed to teach young people about parenting. 

"Cat got your tongue?" my wife asked as we bumped along the freeway one recent afternoon. "I wonder where that phrase comes from?" she added a moment later.

Now here was an opportunity for a husband to be useful. I knew I could simply say, "Origin of the phrase 'cat got your tongue' " into Google's new Nexus One or an Apple iPhone loaded with Microsoft's new Bing search app—the two smartphones I happened to have in my possession—to answer her second question.

Academics and software engineers from the universities of Edinburgh, Manchester, and Southampton have established the Software Sustainability Institute with research communities to develop ways to keep their software current.

Semantic Web technology will be a key tool in the development of a standard policy language for sharing information between agencies, countries, and organizations. 

Physicist Louis Lanzerotti, chairman of the National Science Board's Science and Engineering Indicators committee, says the board's recent report to the White House on the state of science and engineering is generally positive, but there are areas where the U.S. is falling behind the rest of the world.

Tokyo University researchers have created Kojiro, a humanoid robot that is learning to mimic how people walk. 

Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers have developed a way to improve object recognition systems by using information about their context. 

On-board diagnostics know how the car is being driven, for the sake of the driver's (and society's) own good.

When Apple CEO Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone at 2007's Macworld conference, he began by describing the device's groundbreaking user interface. "We have invented a new technology called 'multi-touch' which is phenomenal," Jobs said. "It works like magic." In his superlative-laden way, Jobs explained that Apple's new touch screen was so sensitive that you could use it without a stylus, so smart that it could detect and ignore unintended touches, so elegant that it could understand elaborate multifinger gestures.

And then he added five words to emphasize how special and unique this multitouch technology was: "Boy, have we patented it!"

The National Science Foundation (NSF) announced Tuesday (March 9) the selection of New York University's Subhash Khot, an associate professor at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, to receive the 2010 Alan T. Waterman Award, the NSF's most prestigious honorary award.

On a cold, wet afternoon not long ago, Aron Reznick sat in the lounge of a home for the elderly here, his silver hair neatly combed, his memory a fog. He could not remember Thanksgiving dinner with his family, though when he was given a hint—“turkey”—it came back to him, vaguely, like a shadow in the moonlight.

Two years ago, Mr. Reznick, who has early-stage Alzheimer’s disease and is now 82, signed up for an experiment intended to help people with Alzheimer’s and other memory disorders.

The concept was simple: using digital pictures and audio to archive an experience like a weekend visit from the grandchildren, creating a summary of the resulting content by picking crucial images, and reviewing them periodically to awaken and strengthen…

On a windy morning in downtown Washington, a hundred Georgetown Law students gathered in a hall for David Cole's lecture on democracy and coercion. The desks were cluttered with books, Thermoses, and half-eaten muffins.

Another item was noticeable in its absence: laptop computers. They were packed away under chairs, tucked into backpacks, powered down and forgotten.

Cole has banned laptops from his classes, compelling students to take notes the way their parents did: on paper.

In a meeting at Google in 2004, the discussion turned to an e-mail message the company had received from a fan in South Korea. Sergey Brin, a Google founder, ran the message through an automatic translation service that the company had licensed.

The message said Google was a favorite search engine, but the result read: “The sliced raw fish shoes it wishes. Google green onion thing!”

Mr. Brin said Google ought to be able to do better. Six years later, its free Google Translate service handles 52 languages, more than any similar system, and people use it hundreds of millions of times a week to translate Web pages and other text.

Organized cyber criminals stole more than $25 million from small to mid-sized businesses in brazen e-banking heists in the third quarter of 2009 alone, federal regulators said last week. In contrast, traditional stick-up artists hauled less than $9.5 million out of U.S. banks over that same time period.

University of Illinois researcher John Rogers has collaborated with a team at Tufts University to develop silicon-on-silk electronics, which could one day function as medical devices. 

ICANN CEO Rod Beckstrom continues to work toward net neutrality, but ICANN now faces new challenges as countries such as China seek more control over what Internet users are allowed to view within their borders. 

How 5,000 geographically dispersed strangers teamed up to solve DARPA's Network Challenge.

The San Diego Science Festival , the largest celebration of science on the West Coast, will be held March 20-27 to raise awareness of the importance of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education and to inspire students to pursue STEM careers.