Imagine you’re at the CDC, and you’re trying to predict and respond to this year’s flu season in real-time. You could either contact millions of Americans — or let them contact you via Twitter. In an exciting paper titled “A Model for Mining Public Health Topics from Twitter” posted this week, Johns Hopkins University Assistant Professor Mark Dredze and second-year graduate student Michael Paul demonstrate a way to affordably gather real-time data about our health issues. Not only did the pair’s data support similar efforts, like Google’s Flu Tracker, it also generated new knowledge, according to the BBC: It provided an insight into how Twitter users viewed a range of illnesses […]

Search is a hard problem in computing, but it’s a critical problem in real life, as friends of computer scientist Jim Gray found out when he vanished at sea. In July’s issue of the Communications of the ACM, Gray’s friends describe the story of their technical challenges and lessons learned. Gray was famous for many things, including his determination to work with practitioners to transform the practical challenges they faced into scientific questions that could be formalized and addressed by the research community. As the search for Tenacious wound down, a number of us felt that even though the effort was not successful on its own terms, it offered a […]

Crowds are common at rock concerts, basketball games, and scientific research proposals. Wait — what? In The New York Times this week, there’s an interesting story about scientists looking for funding in creative ways: As research budgets tighten at universities and federal financing agencies, a new crop of Web-savvy scientists is hoping the wisdom — and generosity — of the crowds will come to the rescue. While nonprofit science organizations and medical research centers commonly seek donations from the public, Dr. [Jennifer] Calkins, an adjunct professor of biology at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., and Dr. [Jennifer] Gee may have been the first professional scientists to use a generic […]

In today’s New York Times‘ weekly “Science Times,” science writer John Markoff pens a feature about the state of robotics research — including the many challenges to enabling robots to mimic humans’ basic capabilities of motion and perception. The robotics pioneer Rodney Brooks often begins speeches by reaching into his pocket, fiddling with some loose change, finding a quarter, pulling it out and twirling it in his fingers.   The task requires hardly any thought. But as Dr. Brooks points out, training a robot to do it is a vastly harder problem for artificial intelligence researchers than IBM’s celebrated victory on “Jeopardy!” this year with a robot named Watson.   Although […]

As I’ve previously noted in this space, the CCC Council is scheduled to meet in Washington, DC, this Friday, July 15. Among the discussion topics will be the role of fundamental computing research in Smart Health & Wellbeing as well as in Sustainability. The formal announcement for the public portion of the meeting — which is open to anyone — is below. You are invited to the public portion of a meeting of the Computing Community Consortium (CCC), a committee of 20 leading computer scientists from around the country:   Friday, July 15, 2011 1:00 – 4:30pm ET Hotel Sofitel Washington, DC, Lafayette Square Madeleine Room   The meeting will feature panel […]

Late last month, the White House announced a request for feedback on “Circular A-21” — a 7-year-old document that specifies key principles for determining costs applicable to grants, contracts, and other agreements between the Federal government and educational institutions. The goal is to identify a set of revisions that will revise and clarify the circular — and input from research faculty is strongly encouraged. As Sally Rockey, Deputy Director for Extramural Research at NIH and co-chair of the A-21 Task Force, wrote (emphasis added): This is your chance to have input on an important issue that greatly impacts the research community each and every day. Today, on behalf of the […]