In our “What should we learn from… ” series we report a special issue of the Proceedings of the IEEE in August, Memories in the Future of Information Processing aiming to explore memories and information processing multidimensionally. It covers the subject of memory in its multitudinous forms in circuits and systems.

John Leonard’s group in the MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering specializes in SLAM, or simultaneous localization and mapping, the technique whereby mobile autonomous robots map their environments and determine their locations.

The IEEE Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee reports on past and future workshops, speech databases and various call for proposals.

On July 6 a technical study titled: Keys Under Doormats: Mandating Insecurity by Requiring Government Access to All Data and Communications has been published. The scientists behind this work are more than domain experts. Among the others: Steven M. Bellovin known for his work in the encrypted keys exchange; Josh Benaloh who invented the Benaloh cryptosystem; Matt Blaze who worked on cryptographic files systems; Whitfield Diffie universally known as one the pioneers of public key cryptography; Peter G. Neumann who worked on Provably Secure Operative Systems; Ronald L. Rivest who is “R” in RSA; Jeffrey I. Schiller known for being one of the creator of Kerberos and Bruce Schneier one the biggest expert in security and cryptography.

The general themes of the conference include speaker and language recognition and characterization.