The National Science Foundation (NSF) has issued a solicitation for its Science, Engineering, and Education for Sustainability (SEES) Fellows program, paving the way for funding a second cohort of recent Ph.D.s who wish to pursue interdisciplinary research and education spanning sustainability science and engineering. The program seeks “to advance science, engineering, and education to inform the societal actions needed for environmental and economic sustainability and sustainable human well-being while creating the necessary workforce to address these challenges.” In particular: The program’s emphasis is to facilitate investigations that cross traditional disciplinary boundaries and address issues of sustainability through a systems approach, building bridges between academic inquiry, economic growth, and societal needs. The Fellow’s […]

Earlier this month, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) announced a new initiative that aims “to break the status quo of digital processing” by investigating new ways of “non-digital” computation that are “fundamentally different from current digital processors and the power and speed limitations associated with them.” Called Unconventional Processing of Signals for Intelligent Data Exploitation, or UPSIDE, the initiative specifically seeks “a new, ultra-low power processing method [that] may enable faster, mission-critical analysis of [intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR)] data.” According to the DARPA announcement (after the jump):

NBC Learn — the educational arm of NBC News — is out with a new video about crowdsourcing, featuring Carnegie Mellon University computer scientist Luis von Ahn and his work with CAPTCHA, reCAPTCHA, and, most recently, Duolingo. The video — part of a “Science Behind the News” video series developed in partnership with the National Science Foundation (NSF) to explore advances in science and technology making the news — describes von Ahn’s efforts to digitize books and translate the web into foreign languages. Check out the clip after the jump…

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 […]