Submission by Kristina Lerman (USC Information Sciences Institute) and Tad Hogg (Institute for Molecular Manufacturing)

Social media sites such as Digg use crowd-sourcing and social ("follow") links to help people find interesting stories. Crowd-sourcing relies on the reactions of the first people to see a new story to indicate whether others will find it interesting. Social links allow fine-tuning the selection by emphasizing reactions by a person's friends. These techniques are especially useful filters for the flood of online content whose quality is hard, if not impossible, to determine automatically.

Dr Kevin Knight is one of those guys that I think of when I ponder the word 'Brilliant' (he's not alone, ISI is chockablock with people I place in this category). It's inspirational to be working in the same department as someone who builds computer systems that do wacky things with language: automatically translate mysterious languages only spoken by a handful of people into English, translate rhyming poetry well, or by cracking famously unsolved codes. 

Last Friday, I realized the sort of place I work in: an academic Computer Science institute that bears more than a passing resemblence to the ficticious TV town of 'Eureka'. We don't have flying cars, or intelligent, rebellious, precocious attack bots, but we do have some cool stuff. Take the 128-QuBit Quantum Computer housed the ground floor of parking lot where a sandwich shop used to be, for example. This is the next generation of computers, using the superposition effects of quantum mechanics to process vastly many more states than our current 'classical' computers can accomplish. This is the sort of stuff that really good sci-fi writers incorporate into their novels, it's hardcore-science-at-the-bleeding edge and it's chugging away, downstairs from me right now.