DeepQA: IBM’s Watson supercomputer wowed the nation in February when it beat two Jeopardy! champions. The victory highlights DeepQA technology, software developed by IBM that integrates natural language processing, information retrieval, machine learning, massively parallel computation, and knowledge representation and reasoning in order to answer open-domain questions.

Data-Scope: You’ve heard of microscopes, telescopes, stethoscopes. Now we have the data-scope. Alexander Szalay, a Hopkins computer scientist and astrophysicist, is leading a $3.1 million effort to build a cluster of sophisticated computers that will be able to handle a colossal 5 petabytes of data. (Fifty petabytes would equal the entire written work of humankind, from the beginning of history until now, in all languages.)

Splinternet: Scientists observe that our Internet is turning into a splinternet, segmented into multiple segments, streams, and classes with different speeds, costs, and platforms. Word Spy, an online dictionary of new words, now includes the phrase, which cropped up in the late 1990s.