The President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) heard this morning from Susan L. Graham (UC Berkeley and the Computing Community Consortium), Peter Lee (Microsoft Research), and David E. Shaw (D.E. Shaw & Co.), co-chairs of a small PCAST working group assessing the status and direction of the nation’s Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) program. The objectives of the working group, which is producing a short update to the comprehensive report on the NITRD program that PCAST issued in December 2010 as required by law, are three-fold: to understand what has transpired in the nearly two years since the last report (both in terms of policy and technological advances), […]

Updated Friday, Sept. 7 at 12:45pm EDT: The National Science Foundation (NSF) has issued a statement this afternoon further describing the realignment plans (emphasis added): The National Science Foundation (NSF) yesterday announced plans to realign four program offices in the Office of the Director to maximize research and education outcomes for science and engineering, while enhancing NSF’s operational agility. The proposed organizational changes include:   The Office of Cyberinfrastructure would become a division within the Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering. The Office of Polar Programs would become a division within the Directorate for Geosciences. The Office of International Science and Engineering would be merged with the Office of Integrative Activities, […]

Moments ago, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) of the National Academies released what promises to become a landmark study — Best Care at Lower Cost: The Path to Continuously Learning Health Care in America — comprehensively laying the foundation for a learning health care system that links personal and population data to researchers, practitioners, and patients, thereby “dramatically enhancing the knowledge base on effectiveness of interventions and providing real-time guidance for superior care in treating and preventing illness.” The report presents “a vision of what is possible if the nation applies the resources and tools at hand by marshaling science, information technology, incentives, and care culture to transform effectiveness and efficacy of care.” What’s most […]

We’ve blogged extensively in this space over the last few months about the promise of Big Data science and engineering, including stories describing how very large data sets coupled with predictive analytics capabilities are transforming the way we use e-readers or leverage medical records to drive advances in healthcare. Now here’s an interesting new angle — the world of sports. For all you tennis fans out there, IBM has launched a new analytics tool at this year’s US Open — SlamTracker — to help individuals better understand what’s happening on the courts in Flushing, NY. SlamTracker uses nearly 40 million data points from five years of Grand Slam tournaments to analyze and present each competitor’s performance styles and patterns […]

As we blogged in this space last month, Judea Pearl — winner of the 2011 ACM A. M. Turing Award “for fundamental contributions to artificial intelligence through the development of a calculus for probabilistic and causal reasoning” — delivered his Turing Award Lecture as the opening invited address at the 26th AAAI Conference in Toronto, Canada, in late July. ACM today posted video of the lecture on its website. Watch it here. And read a summary of Pearl’s lecture, as previously contributed to this blog by Vanderbilt computer science and computer engineering associate professor Douglas Fisher, after the jump.

Freelance writer Dan Falk penned an interesting story for The Telegraph last month, reflecting on his experience as a judge in the Turing Test Marathon this summer: Will this summer be remembered as a turning point in the story of man versus machine? On June 23, with little fanfare, a computer program came within a hair’s breadth of passing the Turing test, a kind of parlour game for evaluating machine intelligence devised by mathematician Alan Turing more than 60 years ago.   This wasn’t as dramatic as Skynet becoming self-aware in the Terminator films, or HAL killing off his human crew mates in 2001, A Space Odyssey. But it was still a sign that machines are […]