(This post has been updated; please scroll down for the latest.) Nearly 300 researchers, entrepreneurs, infrastructure providers, city managers, and others from around the country are gathered in Kansas City, MO, this week for the GENI Engineering Conference (GEC) — the twelfth in a series of conferences since the GENI Project was first funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) in 2007 to take a clean-slate approach and create a virtual laboratory for exploring future internets “at scale.” And for the first time, a key focus of the GEC is US Ignite, a new initiative by NSF and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) to spark the development of gigabit applications and services; […]

Most of us have sat down to dinner and wondered just how many calories we are about to consume. Now, thanks to undergraduate researchers at Harvard University, there’s a way to do it quickly, easily, and quite reliably — all with the simple snap of a photo and the reliance of the crowd. According to Harvard’s press release: Americans spend upwards of $40 billion a year on dieting advice and self-help books, but the first step in any healthy eating strategy is basic awareness—what’s on the plate.   If keeping a food diary seems like too much effort, despair not: computer scientists at Harvard have devised a tool that lets […]

That’s the question being posed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which recently announced the DARPA Shredder Challenge — a competition for computer scientists and puzzle enthusiasts alike to piece together a series of shredded documents. The goal is “to identify and assess potential capabilities that could be used by our warfighters operating in war zones, but might also create vulnerabilities to sensitive information that is protected through our own shredding practices throughout the U.S. national security community.” DARPA will award one cash prize of up to $50,000. As Dan Kauffman, Director of DARPA’s Information Innovation Office (I2O), noted in announcing the Challenge: “The ability to reconstruct shredded documents will potentially yield information […]

Back in June, the Administration announced a $500 million Advanced Manufacturing Partnership (AMP) to stimulate the development of new technologies to spur high-tech manufacturing. A key focus was a $70 million commitment to research in next-generation robotics. But there’s another component of the AMP that also warrants some of our attention: called the Materials Genome Initiative (MGI), it’s a multi-agency effort “to double the speed with which we discover, develop, and manufacture new materials.” And as the Administration noted in June, the MGI seeks to “fund computational tools, software, new methods for material characterization, and the development of open standards and databases that will make the process of discovery and development of advanced materials […]