As we’ve noted in this space before, MIT — as part of its 150th anniversary celebration — recently sponsored a series of symposia exploring key interdisciplinary research questions and directions. One that’s of particular interest was titled “Computation and the Transformation of Practically Everything,” and touched on how computer science is changing the world: Computation and the Transformation of Practically Everything traced the evolution of the information age and celebrate MIT’s role in it. The event brought together early and recent pioneers from a variety of fields to review the role computation has played in the past and present and to explore frontiers that lie ahead. We’ve created a webpage linking to […]

A final reminder that the deadline for applications to the 2011-12 Computing Innovation Fellows (CIFellows) Project is 5pm EDT next Tuesday, May 31. Graduates awarded the Ph.D. or equivalent in computing or allied fields from U.S. institutions between May 1, 2010, and Aug. 31, 2011, are eligible to apply. All application materials — including confidential letters of recommendation to be provided separately by the letter writers — must be submitted through the CIFellows Project website by the deadline. The full announcement appears below. A few common questions thus far: To help meet the deadline, applicants may provide names of recommenders prior to submitting an application; CRA/CCC will contact the recommenders while the applicants are gathering […]

What would you do with a 1 Gbps, layer 2 programmable, sliceable network? That’s the central question underlying the US Ignite Gigabit Applications Workshop, a daylong meeting co-hosted by the NSF’s CISE Directorate and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) early last week. The workshop — supported by several other Federal agencies as well as a number of public and private partners — brought together over 80 individuals from colleges/universities, for-profit companies, non-profit organizations, and Federal, state, and local governments from across the country. About US Ignite Recent investments in broadband (>100 Mbps up and down) in highly innovative cities and regions across the country are […]

“How do you get people to buy more? That’s the $1 million question — literally.” RichRelevance and Overstock.com have partnered to offer the first-ever RecLab Prize on Overstock.com — up to $1 million in cash to the person or team capable of building the most powerful online product recommendation engine: The Prize provides a cash award totaling up to $1 million to the researcher or research team who can achieve a measurable lift over existing product recommendations in a wide variety of shopping contexts on Overstock.com. The RecLab Prize rewards the highest performing individual or team based on the results they are able to deliver within a defined judging period (up […]

A number of agencies within the NIH have come together to announce a one-day meeting on “Crowdsourcing: The Art and Science of Open Innovation,” to be held on the NIH grounds in Bethesda, MD, July 18, 2011.  The goal of the meeting is to lay the foundation for running successful challenges in biomedical and health research. Specifically, the meeting will: explore new ways to incentivize innovation in biomedical research with the prize authority recently given to all Federal agencies by Congress. The meeting will focus on the key aspects of this new approach that include: how to identify problems that can be solved through open innovation; how to communicate a scientific […]

The Computing Community Consortium is announcing today a Challenges and Visions Track at the First International Workshop on Managing Interoperability and compleXity in Health Systems (MIX-HS’11), to be held in Glasgow, Scotland, Oct. 28, 2011. MIX-HS’11 will be collocated with the 20th ACM Conference on Information Knowledge and Management. This special MIX-HS’11 track is the latest in a series of “research visions” sessions the CCC is sponsoring at computing research meetings — hoping to provide venues for sharing and discussing forward-looking, visionary ideas for the field, without the constraints of the typical reviewing process. In conjunction with our colleagues at the Mayo Clinic Rochester who are leading the organizing committee — […]