The Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) will host the CCC Council’s very own Fred Schneider at 1pm EST today as part of its 60th Anniversary Commemorative Seminar Series. In a talk titled “Cybersecurity: Technology and Policy,” Fred will describe his research supporting “the construction of concurrent and distributed systems for high-integrity and mission-critical settings with a focus on fault-tolerance and security.” More details, including a link to a live web feed of the talk, after the jump…

Earlier this month, the Department of Health and Human Services’ (DHHS) Center for Medicare & Medicaid Innovation — within the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) — officially rolled out its Health Care Innovation Challenge, with up to $1 billion in grant funding to those who “implement the most compelling new ideas to deliver better health, improved care, and lower costs to people enrolled in Medicare, Medicaid, and Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), particularly those with the highest health care needs.” The objectives of this new initiative are to: Engage a broad set of innovation partners to identify and test new care delivery and payment models that originate in the field […]

Two relevant challenges announced recently that are placing emphasis on prize-based innovation: DEBUT Challenge (for undergraduate students): The National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB) has announced a competition — called the Design by Biomedical Undergraduate Teams (DEBUT) Challenge — for undergraduate students to foster the design and development of innovative diagnostic and therapeutic devices and technologies that address unmet health and clinical needs. According to the DEBUT website (emphasis added): NIBIB’s mission is to improve health by leading the development and accelerating the application of biomedical technologies. The goals of the challenge are 1) to provide undergraduate students valuable experiences such as working in teams, identifying unmet clinical needs, and designing, […]

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) Information Innovation Office (I2O) announced last week its intention to issue, perhaps in December, a solicitation for Crowd Sourced Formal Verification (CSFV), with the goal of investigating “innovative approaches that automatically create games capable of transforming formal verification problems into compelling games for end users to play.” From the official notification: Currently, formal program verification is not widely practiced due to high costs and the fact that fundamental program verification problems resist automation. This is particularly an issue for the Department of Defense because formal verification, while a proven method for reducing defects in software, currently requires highly specialized talent and cannot be scaled to the […]

An interesting computer security research result making news this morning — and stirring some controversy — courtesy of msnbc.com: Could a hacker from half-way around the planet control your printer and give it instructions so frantic that it could eventually catch fire? Or use a hijacked printer as a copy machine for criminals, making it easy to commit identity theft or even take control of entire networks that would otherwise be secure?   It’s not only possible, but likely, say researchers at Columbia University, who claim they’ve discovered a new class of computer security flaws that could impact millions of businesses, consumers, and even government agencies [more after the jump…]. […]

(This post has been updated; please scroll down for the latest.) MIT’s Technology Review has an in-depth interview with Peter Norvig, Google’s Director of Research, and Eric Horvitz, a Distinguished Scientist at Microsoft Research (and a member of the CCC Council), about their optimism for the future of AI: Google and Microsoft don’t share a stage often, being increasingly fierce competitors in areas such as Web search, mobile, and cloud computing. But the rivals can agree on some things — like the importance of artificial intelligence to the future of technology.   [Norvig and Horvitz] recently spoke jointly to an audience at the Computer History Museum in Palo Alto, California, about the promise […]