Earlier this month, Columbia University computer science professor Steven Bellovin was named the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) chief technologist, taking over for Princeton’s Ed Felten following the conclusion of his successful two-year term. In his first post on the Tech@FTC Blog, Bellovin wrote: I’m delighted to succeed Ed Felten as Chief Technologist of the Federal Trade Commission. He’s a hard act to follow! But what does the FTC do, and what is the role of a technologist?   The FTC polices the online marketplace. While that often involves addressing complex issues, one essential requirement is that companies must keep the promises they make to consumers. If an organization’s privacy policy says that […]

The New York Times’s John Markoff has penned another article on robotics today, this time featuring the efforts of Rodney Brooks and Rethink Robotics to engineer robots that work directly with humans in the workplace: If you grab the hand of a two-armed robot named Baxter, it will turn its head and a pair of cartoon eyes — displayed on a tablet-size computer-screen “face” — will peer at you with interest.   The sensation that Baxter conveys is not creepy, but benign, perhaps even disarmingly friendly. And that is intentional.   Baxter, the first product of Rethink Robotics, an ambitious start-up company in a revived manufacturing district here, is a significant bet that robots in the future […]

The Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research (OBSSR) within the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has issued a Request for Information (RFI) announcing its intent to establish a new Mobile Health Public-Private Partnership (mHealth PPP) that would “facilitate research and evidence collection to enable the appropriate use of wireless devices to improve health in both the domestic and global environment” through collaboration among government, academic, non-profit, philanthropic, and private sector organizations. In particular, the RFI seeks to identify organizations that could serve as managing partner and/or participants for the mHealth PPP. According to the RFI (following the link):

The National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Science Nation has featured the work of Mississippi State University computer scientist J. Edward Swan II today, describing how his efforts to improve depth perception are critical to future military and medical applications of augmented reality: Sports fans have come to expect some of the extras they see on their TV screen, such as the yellow lines that appear on a football field highlighting where the ball needs to go for a first down. Similarly, NASCAR fans can find their favorite driver in the pack because of those superimposed car numbers on the screen.   “Anyone who’s seen a football game has seen the virtual first-down line and it […]

The following is a special contribution to this blog from the organizing committee of the Computing Community Consortium’s (CCC) visioning workshop on spatial computing — From GPS and Virtual Globes to Spatial Computing-2020 — held last Monday and Tuesday in Washington, DC. The committee summarizes some of the highlights of the workshop. Spatial computing (SC) is a set of ideas and technologies that will transform our lives by understanding the physical world, knowing and communicating our relation to places in that world, and navigating through those places. The transformational potential of spatial computing is already evident. From virtual maps to consumer GPS devices, our society has benefitted immensely from spatial technology. We’ve reached the point […]

Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee of MIT have posted an interesting entry to the Harvard Business Review Blog about big data and corporate management: Big data has the potential to revolutionize management. Simply put, because of big data, managers can measure, and hence know, radically more about their businesses, and directly translate that knowledge into improved decision making and performance. Of course, companies such as Google and Amazon are already doing this. After all, we expect companies that were born digital to accomplish things that business executives could only dream of a generation ago. But in fact the use of big data has the potential to transform traditional businesses as well.   […]