On Sept. 28 and 29, the Joint Quantum Institute (JQI) — a partnership of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and University of Maryland — will convene a workshop on Quantum Information Science in Computer and Natural Sciences at the Marriott Inn and Conference Center in College Park, MD. Funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) in connection with its recent interdisciplinary faculty program in quantum information science, this workshop is part of a broader effort to respond to the January 2009 National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) report on “A Federal Vision for Quantum Information Science.” We are interested in bringing the computer science and mathematics community to look more closely at […]

New Scientist published an interesting story last week describing how Watson — the IBM question-answering supercomputer that bested the world’s leading human competitors on Jeopardy! in February 2011 — is blazing new trails in medicine, learning how to help doctors diagnose patients: IT IS more than a year since Watson, IBM’s famous supercomputer, opened a new frontier for artificial intelligence by beating human champions of the quiz show Jeopardy!. Now Watson is learning to use its language skills to help doctors diagnose patients.   Progress is most advanced in cancer care, where IBM is working with several US hospitals to build a virtual physicians’ assistant. “It’s a machine that can read everything and forget nothing,” says Larry Norton, […]

The following is a special contribution to this blog by Suchi Saria, a 2011 Computing Innovation Fellow who recently joined the faculty of Johns Hopkins University in computer science as well as health policy and management. Suchi co-led the organization of the second annual symposium on Meaningful Use of Complex Medical Data (MUCMD) in Los Angeles, CA, with Randall Wetzel, professor of anesthesiology at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. Our growing health care need is one of the largest looming crises of our time. In the United States, per capita spending in health care constitutes the highest in the world and almost twice that of the country ranked second. However, our […]

An interesting article in The New York Times this weekend about the resurgence of hardware prototyping in the Bay Area: In recent years, Silicon Valley seems to have forgotten about silicon. It’s been about dot-coms, Web advertising, social networking and apps for smartphones.   But there are signs here that hardware is becoming the new software.   It is an expansion of a trend that began a few years ago with the Flip videophone, a sleeper hit, and has recently accelerated with Nest, the smart thermostat; Lytro, a camera that refocuses a photo after it is taken; and the Pebble smartwatch, a wristwatch that can interact with a smartphone.   Although the hardware is not […]

In a recent article in The New York Times, the newspaper’s technology writer John Markoff describes how advances in robotics have created new opportunities for automation, citing several examples where improved capabilities and reduced cost are changing the value proposition to industry. As is inevitable, these advances are juxtaposed against the impact on employment — in bald terms, will robots put people out of work?

We’ve featured lots of stories about Big Data over the last several months, but here’s a fascinating new one that illustrates the value of Big Data analytics in addressing important national priorities. Researchers at SENSEable City Lab — a new research initiative of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — together with colleagues at GE Healthymagination have analyzed data from over 7 million electronic medical records, illustrating in a powerful visual the (sometimes surprising) relationships between medical conditions on the basis of the frequency of co-occurrences. They’re calling this extensive disease network the “Health InfoScape.” When you have heartburn, do you also feel nauseous? Or if you’re experiencing insomnia, do you tend to put on a […]