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 […]

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 […]

The Bay Area Council Economic Institute (BACEI) is out with a new report that integrates data from multiple sources, including the biennial Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) numbers we featured here several months ago, and presents a revealing county-by-county portrait illustrating where within the U.S. high-tech jobs are found. And the result is quite striking: it’s not just in Silicon Valley, but rather in communities all across the country where there have recently been increases of more than 10 percent in high-tech employment. Here are some of the takeaways the BACEI highlighted in its report:

The National Science Foundation (NSF), together with the United States-Israel Binational Science Foundation (BSF), today announced the U.S.-Israel Collaboration in Computer Science (USICCS), which seeks to support collaborative research projects that “develop new knowledge” in foundational areas of computer science, including the theory of computing and the foundations of software design and systems. In particular, through this program, “U.S.-based researchers will receive funds from NSF to support travel to Israel to interact with their Israeli counterparts.” Proposals are due by Feb. 1, 2013. According to the solicitation (following the link):

The following is a special contribution to this blog by Jenny Korn, a Ph.D. student in communications at the University of Illinois, Chicago. Korn was one of the participants of last week’s 2012 Summer Social Webshop on Technology-Mediated Social Participation, co-organized by Alan Neustadtl, Jennifer Preece, and Ben Shneiderman, faculty at the University of Maryland at College Park, as well as Marc Smith of the Social Media Research Foundation. Chosen from more than 100 applications, 50 doctoral students gathered at the University of Maryland last week for the Summer Social Webshop (the website includes videos of presentations!). The well-crafted presentations triggered lively discussions at the intersection of social media and network analysis. We represented many disciplines, including communications, sociology, information science, […]