From a sampling of the table of contents:

Ongoing Challenges in Face Recognition
Large-Scale Activity-Recognition Systems
Complex Networks: Ubiquity, Importance, and Implications
The Promise of Synthetic Biology
Population Dynamics of Human Language: A Complex System
Agent-Based Modeling as a Decision-Making Tool
DINNER SPEECH: Engineering for a New World

This report is freely available as PDF.

Frontiers of Engineering: Reports on Leading-Edge Engineering

This is a press release; it's a marker to come back to later.

Basis Technology announced today the launch of an initiative to create the next generation of digital forensics products, and the appointment of two renowned experts to lead this effort.

Dr. Simson Garfinkel, a well-known author and award-winning journalist has accepted the position of Consulting Scientist and Forensics Software Architect.

Basis Technology (www.basistech.com) provides software solutions for multilingual text mining and information retrieval applications. The company's Rosette(R) Linguistics Platform is a suite of high-performance, highly reliable, interoperable software components designed for applications that analyze and process all the world's languages.

Simson Garfinkel To Lead Digital Forensics Initiative

I bet this kind of thing happens to you all the time ...

It began six months ago, when Brilliant was playing golf at the Presidio. His cell phone rang, and Chris Anderson, the former publishing magnate who now runs the TED Conference, informed Brilliant that he had been given $100,000 and unlimited plane tickets to come up with an idea for bettering the world.

Also:

Google Inc., which has said it plans to put $1 billion into its charitable efforts, hired as its first chief of philanthropy a man who has helped eliminate smallpox in the Third World, founded a pioneering online community and rubbed elbows with the Grateful Dead.

Dr. Larry Brilliant, 61, of Mill Valley will become executive director of Google.org as it gets started on its mission of "applying innovation and significant resources to the largest of the world's problems," in the words of Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page.

Some Brilliant Guy At Google Will Fix Everything

Geocaching is a hobby that combines hiking and treasure hunting with the latest advances in portable global positioning system devices. Cachers, as they like to be called, hide waterproof containers -- caches -- and mark their exact locations with GPS coordinates that are posted on the Internet. Other cachers get the coordinates, punch the numbers into hand-held GPS receivers and follow the digital directions to the hidden prizes.

Sounds like a hobby for nerds? No doubt, but geocaching can be stimulating and addictive.

Cache prizes

Me, too! Me, too!

Amazon.com is preparing to take on Apple Computer in digital music by introducing its own portable music player that would be linked to an online music service.

Upon seeing the headline, I just had to click through to the story, because "Amazon Will Take On iPod" seemed like a really stupid idea to me. It turns out the lead-in is borderline misreporting, because they're really taking on Creative Labs and the other manufacturers of the Microsoft-based players, and they're going to compete with Rhapsody and Napster, not iTunes Music Store.

Amazon really does have an opportunity here, and the collaborative filtering technology behind their recommendation agent would be nice to have integrated with a music player, not to mention the extensive music reviews, both of the professional and customer-submitted varieties.

I like having Rhapsody To Go, but quality really drops through the floor at the point in the product chain where Real's responsibilities end and Microsoft's begin.

Amazon has said it hopes to introduce the service by summer.

I have a hard time believing that timeline, unless they're already (secretly) pretty far along in their development of the player. If Amazon's hardware partner is going to rebuild Microsoft's DRM infrastructure from scratch, and do it well, it's going to take more time than they've allocated. If they push the schedule to get the product to market, it's unlikely to be successful.

Regardless, this is a positive development, because even if it ultimately fails as a product and service, it is likely to spur Microsoft to improve theirs. History seems to show that serious competitive threats are the best way to motivate Microsoft.

Amazon Will Take On iPod [Not Really...] With Its Own Music Player

Speaking to workers at the 3M corporate headquarters in Maplewood, Minn., the president used DoD's investment in the research and development that ultimately led to the Internet as a model for the innovation he hopes to spark nationwide.

"I don't know if people realize this, but the Internet began as a Defense Department project to improve military communications," Bush told the group. "In other words, we were trying to figure out how to better communicate, here was research money spent, and as a result of this sound investment, the Internet came to be."

I love how the "I don't know" clause really folksies up the speech. And did you notice how he used "we", like he was right there on the scene? When Bush was missing his guard duty, he must have been at the Network Working Group. (The time frames do line up relatively closely ...)

Not only did the government invent the iPod, it also invented the Internet. (By the way, has anyone told the Queen the truth about the iPod?)

Bush's version of the story is so neat and tidy. Who needs the 268 pages that Janet Abbate wrote?

Bush's speech calls to mind this excerpt from Drucker:

Futurists always measure their batting average by counting how many things they have predicted that have come true. They never count how many important things come true that they did not predict. Everything a forecaster predicts may come to pass. Yet, he may not have seen the most meaningful of the emergent realities or, worse still, may not have paid attention to them. There is no way to avoid this irrelevancy in forecasting, for the important and distinctive are always the result of changes in values, perception and goals, that is, in things that one can divine but not forecast.

If only there were more women in engineering, our diamond turning machines would weigh 150 tons, they would use measurements 100 times smaller than the human hair, and they would be connected to the Internet. Just think how much sharper our chain saws could be!

Bush Cites DoD Internet Development in Promoting US Innovation

92 percent of all cameras sold are now digital.

Camera companies no longer feel compelled to mimic the size, shape and features of film cameras.

The hot trend for 2006 is image stabilization.

Several "still" cameras in Canon's SD and A series can film at 60 frames per second.

Cameras you'll buy in 2007 and 2008 may include GPS receivers,

Pixel Counting Joins Film in Obsolete Bin

Burn, flip, burn. It's that simple to create customized laser-etched labels using LightScribe Direct Disc Labeling technology*—in the same drive that burns your data.

Cool. (Although the LightScribe DVD media are currently twice the price of regular blank DVDs.)

LightScribe technology - HP Digital Entertainment

Sometimes you just can't wait for the book. When you need to learn a new technology right now, turn to the Rough Cuts service from Safari Books Online. You'll get early access to books on cutting-edge technologies-you can literally read them as they're being written.

Safari Rough Cuts

At this year's CES, the real news was neither shiny nor tiny. The question in the air was what people will watch, listen to and do with these machines now that they are becoming interchangeable and interconnected.

Old-line media companies' fears can be lumped into three nightmarish categories:

¶ Business-model anxiety. Will paid download services undercut TV advertising?

¶ Creative anxiety. McLuhan is out. The medium is no longer the message.

¶ Control anxiety. The long tail is in. The career prospects for hit makers, gatekeepers and even fact checkers may well be in doubt.

The lesson here is that on MySpace there is no distinction between personal and mass media.

As Gadgets Get It Together, Media Makers Fall Behind