Blog archive

SRI is proud to welcome all the attendees of the annual Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) Mad Scientist Conference to SRI headquarters in the heart of Silicon Valley. The theme of this year’s conference, “Bio Convergence and the Soldier 2050,” will address emerging and future scientific advances and technology developments to improve capabilities and…

Despite rising high school graduation rates, 4.9 million young adults between the ages of 16 and 24—or 12.3 percent of U.S. youth—were neither working nor in school in 2015. There is a clear and pressing need to support students before they drop out of high school, and to reengage those who are no longer enrolled.…

No scientist or researcher can keep current with the vast number of potentially relevant journal articles and technical documents published each year in a given field.  As with many problems involving overwhelming amounts of information, computers and advanced machine learning/artificial intelligence tools offer a potential solution. Text analytics can be applied to entire document sets…

The Arecibo Observatory has withstood the wrath of Hurricane Maria. I am happy to say that all the staff members and their families are safe and accounted for. The staff has spent the past week performing cleanup activities as well as inspecting the physical structures and the research equipment. The Observatory sustained less damage than…

SRI recently released our first report on the Open Education Resource (OER) Degree Initiative, an effort led by Achieving the Dream (ATD), a network of more than 200 community colleges, to boost college access and student success. The program supports the redesign of courses needed for a degree using OER materials in place of proprietary…

Imagine being a new teacher, thrust into your first classroom and given sole responsibility for managing the students, planning and executing the lessons, and assessing student learning. Imagine your first teaching experience being in a school with high teacher turnover, high student mobility, and limited resources to support you, working with students whose needs—financial and…

It is widely known that the U.S. is facing a shortage of skilled labor. According to a report released by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, more than 36 million adults in the U.S. do not have the basic literacy and math skills needed for entry-level jobs – that’s about 1 in 6 adults.…

In SRI International’s new brief, Access and Equity in Linked Learning, we share what we’ve learned about the promise and challenges of achieving equitable, career-themed pathways from our 7-year study of Linked Learning. Linked Learning is an approach to transforming the high school experience by creating academically rigorous, career-themed pathways in either stand-alone small schools or academies within large…

The Shakey robot, built at SRI International in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, was the world’s first mobile robot to perceive its environment, figure out how to execute goals given by the user, and then perform actions.  Artificial intelligence (AI) researchers today are still working on these problems, in ever more complex environments and…