… and a shout-out early in Stephen Colbert’s hilarious commencement address. Congratulations Barbara!  Watch Colbert’s remarks here.

Tom Malone and Luis von Ahn — with funding from the NSF’s CISE Directorate — are organizing an interdisciplinary conference that seeks to bring together researchers from a variety of fields relevant to understanding and designing collective intelligence of many types. This first-ever conference — Collective Intelligence 2012 — will take place in Cambridge, MA, on April 18-20, 2012, and comprise invited talks, oral paper presentations, and poster sessions. From the official call for papers:

A couple of very interesting prize-based competitions have been announced in the past week. The first — with Vint Cerf, U.S. Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra, and former Congressman Tom Davis among the judges — calls for innovative ways for IT to improve government: The Merit Awards is a new innovation contest that challenges the world to come forth with ideas on how to use IT to improve the quality of government. Focused on incenting people to get involved in their government, the award offers a $50,000 prize for smart, new thinking. But the program is not only open to Americans. Innovation knows no borders — nor does it need a […]

A new National Science and Technology Council report released Monday — titled A Policy Framework for 21st Century Grid — describes ways to speed development of a smart grid that reduces energy consumption, efficiently delivers power from renewable sources, and decreases the frequency and length of blackouts. What’s most interesting — to us, anyway — is how the report calls attention to the need for fundamental research in several areas of computer science. Notably, “the four essential pillars that will enable the U.S. to transition to a smarter grid” all feature aspects of IT R&D prominently: Enable Cost-Effective Smart Grid Investments: Smart grid technology can drive improvements in system efficiency, resiliency, and […]

Following up on an article about rising enrollments in computer science this past Saturday, The New York Times has just published a fabulous Room for Debate essay series titled “Computer Science’s ‘Sputnik Moment’?“: Computer science is a hot major again. It had been in the doldrums after the dot-com bust a decade ago, but with the social media gold rush and the success of “The Social Network,” computer science departments are transforming themselves to meet the demand. At Harvard, the size of the introductory computer science class has nearly quadrupled in five years.   The spike has raised hopes of a ripple effect throughout the American education system — so much so […]

The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has issued several solicitations in recent weeks focused on health information technology R&D. AHRQ appears to be taking a fairly broad view of health IT: Health IT is broadly defined as the use of information and communication technology in health care to support the delivery of patient or population care or to support patient self-management.  Health IT can support patient care related activities such as order communications, results reporting, care planning and clinical or health documentation (Shortliffe EH and JJ Cimino, “Biomedical Informatics: Computer Applications in Health Care and Biomedicine.” Third Edition. 2006).  […]