WHAT: The Jeopardy! IBM challenge pits the long-running game show’s two most successful contestants against an IBM computer named Watson, as a demonstration of its ability to understand and respond to natural language questions.  Figuring out the contextual cues and ambiguity found in normal human speech, especially the tricky wordplay found in Jeopardy!

Philadelphia City Council has officially declared Feb. 15 as “ENIAC Day,” celebrating the 65th anniversary of the historic computer’s dedication at Penn, and the beginning of the digital age that it helped to usher in.   The Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, or ENIAC, was built to calculate ballistic trajectories for the Army during World War II, a time- and labor-intensive process that had previously been performed by teams of mathematicians working with mechanical calculators. Under the direction of John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert of Penn’s Moore School of Electrical Engineering (now the School of Engineering and Applied Science), construction of the 27-ton, 680-square-foot computer began in July 1943 and was announced to the public on Feb. 14, 1946. As the first electronic general-purpose computer, ENIAC was a major step forward from its technological predecessors: calculating machines that had their roots in ancient math tools like the abacus.

PHILADELPHIA -- New research from the University of Pennsylvania is challenging some longtime assumptions about why human beings seek and keep their friends, and it reveals a somewhat darker side to the very nature of friendship itself.

Photo credit: John Donges Jordan with his handler, Salem County Officer Bill Robinson.