DARPA wants to "invent the future of information technology by exploring alternative visions" via an Expeditions into the 21st Century program to encourage "vigorous and revolutionary research in information technology" outside current models of technology, application areas, and modes of use. Areas might include bio-informatics or ubiquitous computing. "Think big and bold," as Xerox PARC did in research leading to PCs, GUIs, laser printing, etc. "Expeditions" will receive initial funding that can be used to scout the terrain. Single or multiple organizations are OK. 20Jan99 (with abstracts by 07Dec98), BAA 99-07; Jay A. Sears , (703) 522-7161 fax. or . [CBD, 29Oct98.] (Wow, I'm not used to BAA solicitations that aren't written in governmentese.)

New NSF briefs include "Venture Capital Investment Trends in the United States and Europe," , and "R&D as a Percent of GDP is Highest in Six Years," . [CNS, 28Oct98.]

NSF has issued its "Guide to Programs, Fiscal Year 1999," replacing nsf97150. . [Maria Zemankova , IRLIST, 26Oct98.]

NSF's Next Generation Software program is documented at . [Clifford Lynch , ibid.]

The Business Technology Center (Altadena, CA) is a new high-tech incubator with room for 30-50 companies -- mostly software/Internet spinoffs from Caltech and JPL. It supports "an emerging technology corridor from Cal Poly Pomona to the City of Hope Cancer Center in Duarte to Caltech to the Huntington Medical Research Institutes in Pasadena, then to JPL and all the way out to the media gulch in Glendale and Burbank." [LA Times, 12Oct98. Edupage.]

Dawn Cohen notes that the new law increasing the limit on high-tech visas also deems foreign workers subject to export-of-technology restrictions. An employer can't hire a person on an H1-B visa to work on software that couldn't be exported to that person's country of origin (e.g., Indians working on encryption software). This may slow the issuing of visa approvals. . [, 27Oct98.]

Ed Zandler of Sun is claiming a 3-year lead on Windows NT with Sun's new Solaris 7.0 Unix operating system. Solaris is 64-bit-addressable, and runs on Sparc and Intel-based servers. It has only 12M-13M lines of code, vs. about 35M for Windows NT. [NYT, 27Oct98. Edupage.]

Sun is offering Solaris 7.0 free to developers and educational institutions. It is also supporting both Linux and Java by licensing its source code for the Java Development and Compatibility Kits. [TechWeb, 29Oct98. Edupage.]

IBM, Sequent, and the Santa Cruz Organization will develop a single Unix-based OS that will run on Intel and IBM microprocessors. [NYT, 27Oct98. Edupage.]

IBM has a 5,800-chip supercomputer operating at 3.9TFLOPS (at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory), and hopes to reach 10TFLOP by 2000 and 100TFLOP by 2004. [NYT, 28Oct98. Edupage.]

The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) uses a 70GFLOP processor analyzing 58M frequency channels simultaneously. New systems are planned that will be a thousand times that fast, permitting search for Earth-equivalent technology out to hundreds of light years. [Peter R. Backus, seminar notice, 22Oct98. Bill Park.]

Sylvia Engdahl's essay at suggests that humans must expand into space or destroy ourselves on Earth, and that we will soon lose the technological resources and social will for space exploration if we don't act now to move heavy manufacturing into orbit (where energy is plentiful, materials can be mined from the moon, and pollution won't poison Earth). She sees human exploration of Mars as a diversion, but one necessary to build public interest in orbital or near-Earth manufacturing and colonization. [MindsI, 03Nov98.]

(The MindsI site at has been seconded by Kurt Reiser as a very interesting forum for futurism discussions -- including speculation this week on harnessing the energy and quantum computational power of the the Big Crunch.)

MIT is continuing its Fall 1998 public lecture series on "GOD AND COMPUTERS: Minds, Machines, and Metaphysics." Brian Cantwell-Smith and Joel Moses will be speaking on 11Nov98 and 09Dec98. . [Anne Foerst , mit.lcs.seminar, 9/23/98.]

Bill Park reports a current New Scientist article which says Stanford physicists are doing tabletop experiments that might lead to direct interaction with a fifth spatial dimension, warp space, form a black hole, and create new universes. [, 25Oct98.] (Bill suggests that the environmental impact report may delay them a bit.)

Lexington, MA: BS AI games programmer.

Yale U. (New Haven, CT): postdoc in robotic vision.

URochester (NY): profs in DB, multimedia, experimental systems.

Monmouth College (IL): CS prof.

Seattle, WA: BS program managers in NL for a grammar checker.

Nuance Communications (Menlo Park, CA): speech dialog developers.

PRAJA (San Diego, CA): BS developers in Java-based VR.

Anglia Tech (Cambridge, UK): PhD student in NN, image processing.

Aculab (Milton Keynes, UK): developer in speech algorithms, DSP.

UNijmegen (Netherlands): GRA in recognition of noisy speech.

UZurich (Switzerland): PhD student in biorobotics, AI, autonomous agents.

DARPA's Tactical Mobile Robotics Program selected JPL as head of a consortium to create miniature tactical mobile robots for urban military operations. This is a $4M contract, and JPL was selected from among 50 finalists. Other consortium members are IS Robotics (Somerville, MA) for robotic platforms); CMU for perception; Oak Ridge National Laboratory for map-making; and USC for the operator interface. A prototype will be completed by the end of 1999. The "backpackable" microrover will be less than 16" long, but rugged enough to be tossed over fences or through windows and agile enough to climb stairs. It should be able to deactivate booby traps, deliver payloads, watch for motion and "detect hostile entities," or simply listen for sounds and vibrations. . [Ron Baalke , comp.robotics.misc, 08Sep98.]

Robot soccer? Oliver Obst has implemented a soccer server interface library for ECLiPSe-Prolog (RoboLog), downloadable at . The UKoblenz simulated soccer team is proprietary, but development partners are welcome. See for details of the logic/deduction-based approach. [, comp.lang.prolog, 23Oct98.]

ActivMedia Robotics is offering a new Pioneer 2 mobile robot platform, with trade-in allowance on Pioneer 1s. Three wheeled models with sensors, onboard computing, and claimed low prices. , (603) 924-9100. [, 11/1/98.]

Good robotics magazines include the new monthly Robot Science & Technology, , and the quarterly Robot Digest from Whirlwind Publications, 1700 Washington Ave., Rocky Ford, CO 81067; (719) 254-4558. Online resources include the FAQ at ; BEAM robotics at ; and the robotics groups in Seattle , Portland , and Dallas . [John Piccirillo , comp.robotics.misc, 29Nov97 and 18Feb98.]

Successful inventors need business and communication skills as well as mechanical expertise. R.J. Riley has constructed a comprehensive website for would-be inventors, at . [, K12 Opportunities, 10Sep98. net-hap.]

Douglas Fraser got a chuckle out of MIT's "shirt button" gas-turbine power packs for computer gear. He suggests some dual-use products: "Combination pager/hand warmer for those Northern climates. Cell phone/cigarette lighters so you can smoke and talk on the phone while you drive. GPS/fire starter for those REALLY long walks in the woods. Remote alarm/lock deicer for your car. Garage door remote/windsheild deicer. Laptop/lap warmer. How about a desk clock/hot plate for your coffee cup?" [, 23Oct98.] (The Business Week news item (13Jul98) didn't discuss heat dissipation, but it couldn't be high or the packs wouldn't be competitive with lithium batteries for cell phones. Add a Pentium, though...)

Peter Norvig has left Junglee (where he was chief scientist) to become chief of the Computational Sciences Div. at NASA Ames Research Center. Congratulations -- may you have time to supervise interesting research! [, 30Oct98.] (I've heard that there may be some management-level CS slots opening at NASA Ames, but I don't know any more about the jobs. Maybe Peter would know when and where such openings are announced.)

Correction: the UCI "prof in neural computation" position in our AI career jobs digest yesterday is actually a general interdisciplinary position that needn't include neural computation. UCI is looking for candidates in computational statistics, scientific data visualization, graphics, biomedical computing, computational biology, or information retrieval. [Padhraic Smyth , 04Nov98.] (Congratulations to Padhraic on his recent award of tenure!)

-- Ken