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The Computer History Museum announced its 2012 Fellow Award honorees: Edward Feigenbaum, pioneer of artificial intelligence and expert systems; Steve Furber and Sophie Wilson, chief architects of the ARM processor architecture; and Fernando Corbató, pioneer of timesharing and the Multics operating system. The four Fellows will be inducted into the Museum’s Hall of Fellows on Saturday, April 28, 2012, at a gala dinner marking the 25th anniversary of the Awards.

The Fellow Awards bring to life the Computer History Museum’s mission to preserve and present the artifacts and stories of the information age. The tradition began with the Museum’s first Fellow, Grace Murray Hopper, and has grown to a distinguished and select group of 54 members. This award represents the highest achievement in computing, honoring the people who have forever changed the world with their innovations. “The Fellows program recognizes the leading figures of the information age—men and women who have shaped the computing revolution and changed the world forever,” said John Hollar, Museum President and CEO.

More Jobs Predicted for Machines, Not People By STEVE LOHR, NY Times, (October 23, 2011). "A faltering economy explains much of the job shortage in America, but advancing technology has sharply magnified the effect, more so than is generally understood, according to two researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. ... Faster, cheaper computers and increasingly clever software, the authors say, are giving machines capabilities that were once thought to be distinctively human, like understanding speech, translating from one language to another and recognizing patterns. So automation is rapidly moving beyond factories to jobs in call centers, marketing and sales — parts of the services sector, which provides most jobs in the economy."

Are jobs obsolete? By Douglas Rushkoff, Special to CNN (September 7, 2011). "New technologies are wreaking havoc on employment figures -- from EZpasses ousting toll collectors to Google-controlled self-driving automobiles rendering taxicab drivers obsolete. Every new computer program is basically doing some task that a person used to do. But the computer usually does it faster, more accurately, for less money, and without any health insurance costs.

We like to believe that the appropriate response is to train humans for higher level work. Instead of collecting tolls, the trained worker will fix and program toll-collecting robots. But it never really works out that way, since not as many people are needed to make the robots as the robots replace. ... we might want to stop thinking about jobs as the main aspect of our lives that we want to save. They may be a means, but they are not the ends."

CCC Announces 2011 Computing Innovation Fellows (October 14, 2011). Seven are listed in the research area 'AI/machine learning/robotics/vision'. "The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) - a standing committee of the Computing Research Association (CRA) - today named 20 exceptional recent Ph.D. graduates in computer science (and allied fields) to its 2011 class of Computing Innovation Fellows (CIFellows; http://cifellows.org/). These 20 talented researchers have been competitively awarded postdoctoral positions of up to two years at academic institutions and industrial research laboratories throughout the U.S. Made possible by a $6.5 million National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to CRA - the third grant in as many years - the 2011 CIFellowships are a continuation of the highly successful effort begun in 2009 to forestall a permanent loss of research talent likely to occur as a consequence of the financial crisis and subsequent economic downturn."

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