stanford

PALO ALTO, Calif.--Bill Gates began his address to students on Tuesday by playing to the home crowd.

He noted that CEO Steve Ballmer attended the school, though Gates convinced his buddy to drop out of the Stanford MBA program to join Microsoft. Other notable Stanford alumni are Microsoft research head Rick Rashid and Windows Live executive Chris Jones.

"We owe a lot to the school," Gates said. In a further attempt to warm up the crowd, Gates played an updated version of the humorous video he showed at the Consumer Electronics Show spoofing what his last day might be like. … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--A Stanford research team has concluded that the ocean not far off the Northern California coastline is the most promising spot for an offshore wind farm to generate power.

Specifically, the researchers concluded that the sea off Cape Mendocino, roughly 150 miles northwest of San Francisco, was their top pick. Wind turbines there could supply 5 percent of California's electrical power needs, they projected.

The researchers plan to present their findings Thursday at the American Geophysical Union conference here Thursday.

There are a number of offshore wind farms--one to the west of Denmark springs to mind--but most of … Read more

The 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge represents a new frontier in autonomous vehicle technology. We were live onsite for the final of this year's event, which saw 11 robot cars compete in a six-hour contest in a simulated urban environment, complete with traffic, intersections, and parking lots. The rolling robots varied from a driverless 12-ton Oshkosh truck to an autonomous Toyota Prius. Check out our video diary from this weekend's event.

It's a small thing, but Sony got some good news today related to its troubled PlayStation 3 video game console. In fact, the system helped set a new Guinness World Record.

The record was set by Stanford University's Folding@home project, a distributed computing system utilizing PS3s among other computers, to help scientists study the effects of a process called "protein folding" on a series of serious diseases.

Well, Guinness has apparently certified the project as the world's most powerful distributed computing system. According to a release from Sony, Folding@home topped 1 petaflop last … Read more

Excitement is building in the world of car tech as the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge approaches. The event, which is the third and most demanding to date in the DARPA Challenge series, requires driverless vehicles to perform mock military supply missions completely autonomously. Over a 60-mile course, the robotic cars will be required to merge into moving traffic, navigate traffic circles, negotiate busy intersections, and avoiding obstacles. Thirty-five teams will compete in the Grand Challenge semifinals taking place between October 26 and 31, with 20 vehicles going on to compete in the final race on November 3. Check out our … Read more

As a Bay Area native steeped in academia--my father is a college professor--I always wanted to believe in the primacy of universities in just about everything.

That's why, for years, I had assumed that the most important factor in the development of Silicon Valley as the world's leading technology center was Stanford. After all, it is located in Palo Alto, Calif., right in the middle of the Valley, and its students and graduates were behind such industry powerhouses as Hewlett-Packard, Yahoo, Google and many others.

Well, as my story, How NASA helped invent Silicon Valley, which is up … Read more

PALO ALTO, Calif.--The 2008 Presidential election will determine whether wireless networks will be open or closed, former Federal Communications Chairman Reed Hundt said during a presentation at the Hot Chips conference taking place here at Stanford this week.

The FCC is gearing up for the January auction of the spectrum--the 1GHz and below part of the spectrum--currently dedicated to UHF TV. It's valuable spectrum, Hundt noted. It goes through walls and building. A nationwide network on the spectrum should cost about one-tenth of the cost it would require to build a network for the 2.4GHz spectrum.

"… Read more

(This is the second post in a series written "live" from Hot Chips 19 at Stanford University.)

Vernor Vinge is best known as a science-fiction writer, but he's also a computer scientist; he retired from his professorship at San Diego State University five years ago. (I mentioned his participation in a panel at Siggraph earlier this month here.)

Vinge's talk was titled "Digital Gaia," a reference to the Gaia Hypothesis. (I see Vinge used the same title for a January, 2000 essay in Wired, here.) Vinge described several scenarios for the future of the integrated-circuit industry, building on some… Read more

I'm blogging today from Hot Chips 19, the annual chip technology conference hosted by Stanford University. I'm planning to summarize each session as it happens.

Before the sessions began, there were some announcements--expected attendance, for example, is about 600 people.

Famed computer architect John Mashey spoke on behalf of the Computer History Museum, giving an update on museum exhibits and inviting Hot Chips attendees to visit while they're in town. The museum will have one of the two working copies of Charles Babbage… Read more