Our smartphones are quite capable, but not really very intelligent. They have more computational power than the supercomputers NASA used to reach the moon and are loaded with sensors, but lack "situational awareness" — an ability to understand their context and use that knowledge to provide better services for their users.

CSEE professor Tim Finin is one of the organizers of a workshop on Activity Context Representation: Techniques and Languages that is focused on the problems underlying making mobile devices more intelligent. The workshop will address techniques and systems to allow mobile devices model, reason about, and recognize the activities and context of their users and exploit those models to provide better services. The workshop is sponsored by the sponsored by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence and will be held on August 7th and 8th in San Francisco as part of AAAI-11, the Twenty-Fifth Conference on Artificial Intelligence.

Finin is working with colleagues Anupam Joshi and Laura Zavala and students from the ebiquity lab on the NSF-sponsored Platys project that is working on this problem. The project is developing software for Android phones that uses machine learning algorithms to recognize their users' activities and their roles in them and selectively share this information with other devices based on user-defined privacy policies.

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We here at USDemocrazy have been keeping you up to date on the tragic tsunami in the Pacific and the damage it caused to one of Japan’s nuclear power plants.

Today we though we’d give you a different perspective on the bad press nuclear power has received in the last couple of weeks.

Seth Godin has a post comparing deaths caused by nuclear power to those caused by oil and coal. Take a second to think which one of those two power sources is the most deadly, then check out this chart:

Godin follows saying;

“Vivid is not the same as true. It’s far easier to amplify sudden and horrible outcomes than it is to talk about the slow, grinding reality of day to day strife. That’s just human nature.”

This is an interesting observation.

No one is belittling the horrible disaster in Japan and those affected by the subsequent radiation.

Godin is merely suggesting that the slow hidden deaths caused by coal and oil consumption don’t get the attention that a leaky reactor might.

In light of the tragedy in Japan it would be easy to shy away from nuclear power. But are the alternatives any better?

Clearly this is a question we should consider as we ponder the future of energy.