Former SIFT summer intern Daniel Geschwender has won a $7,500 Barry M. Goldwater scholarship for his continued pursuit of computer science education and research. This highly-competitive scholarship provides "a continuing source of highly qualified scientists, mathematicians, and engineers." Daniel is one of 271 recipients nationwide, with just 14 going to computer science students. Daniel is finishing his undergraduate studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and will continue his research on SAT Solvers and Machine Learning this summer at the University of British Columbia. Read more in the UNL news release.

Dr. Christopher Miller gave an invited address to the AAAI Fall Symposium on Human Interaction with Biologically-Inspired Swarms which took place in Washington D.C. in December. Dr. Miller spoke about the pros and cons of “true” swarms (which he defined as acting in accordance with an innate set of “instincts” or “source code” and not accepting any explicit tasking instructions) and contrasted them with explicit delegation approaches and adaptable automation in which explicit tasking instructions are a key feature. “The primary difference”, he claimed, “is the degree of 'controllability': swarms do what they do with little attention and workload required from a human supervisor. Insofar as we can find or create conditions in which they’re doing that..., that’s great… but we don’t have a great track record of controlling biological swarms, so perhaps some more explicit instructability will be desirable.”