Today, computers are the infrastructure that helps us find almost everything: hotel rooms, jobs, mortgages, taxicabs, health care, and more.
One British couple waited five years to hear their daughter's first words, and they came through an eye-recognition computer that helps people communicate using a synthesized voice program.
The same software that has helps phone users type more quickly has been installed in the computer that helps Stephen Hawking to speak, roughly doubling the speed at which he can talk.
Whether these threats are man-made or natural, malicious or unintended, our ability to create computer models that help us think robustly about plausible future scenarios is increasingly being used to improve our understanding of the consequences emerging from the complex intersection of human society, technology, and the physical environment.
In the past, he says, "We used computer techniques and tools that helped us compare things.
With his students, he launched the BOOM (Berkeley Orders of Magnitude) project to develop a new programming model for distributed computers that helps programmers avoid specifying the steps of a computation in a particular order.
The laptops and smart phones we carry with us today have more computing power than many of the massive mainframe computers that helped guide humans to the moon in the late 1960s.
Compaq Computer said that Ericsson agreed to spend at least $500 million on Compaq server computers that help manage cellular telephone service.
Last week, Quanta Research Cambridge, a Taiwan-based manufacturer of laptop computers that helped finance the project, provided a way for people to upload video clips to their Web site and to see a video that is run through the program.
But mounted on the frame of the glasses are the tiny video cameras, and beneath the sports coat, strapped against his body, are the half-dozen computers that help him record, reinterpret, augment and share his experiences.
