A few weeks ago, we began highlighting a few of the 107 Computing Innovation Fellows (CIFellows) we’ve had the pleasure of funding. (With support from the NSF, the CIFellows Project was established two years ago to provide recent Ph.D.s in computer science and allied fields exciting one- to two-year opportunities at universities and industrial research labs. A key goal was to retain these bright young graduates in research and teaching during the economic downturn. A total of 60 CIFellows were funded in 2009, followed by 47 others in 2010.) The CIFellows listed below — again, they’re in no particular order — are pursuing groundbreaking computing research in areas like learning, biology, sustainability, and […]

Every year at this time, Microsoft Research recognizes outstanding new faculty members — nominated by their universities as the best and brightest in their fields. This year’s class of Faculty Fellows — with interests spanning economics and game theory, bioelectronics, sustainability, healthcare, computer vision, computer security, etc. — was announced moments ago at the annual MSR Faculty Summit here in Redmond: Maria Florina Balcan Georgia Institute of Technology Assistant Professor School of Computer Science   Maria Florina Balcan is an assistant professor in the School of Computer Science at Georgia Institute of Technology. She received her PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University under the supervision of Avrim Blum. From October 2008 until […]

In a post on the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) Blog today, Deputy Director for Policy Tom Kalil noted the Administration’s keen interest in Big Data — and singled out the CCC’s recent white papers on data analytics: …Researchers in a growing number of fields are generating extremely large data sets, commonly referred to as “Big Data.” For example, the size of DNA sequencing databases is increasing by a factor of 10 every 18 months!  Researchers need better tools to help them store, index, search, visualize, and analyze these data, allowing them to discover new patterns and connections.   Increases in the ability to make predictions and […]

Imagine you’re at the CDC, and you’re trying to predict and respond to this year’s flu season in real-time. You could either contact millions of Americans — or let them contact you via Twitter. In an exciting paper titled “A Model for Mining Public Health Topics from Twitter” posted this week, Johns Hopkins University Assistant Professor Mark Dredze and second-year graduate student Michael Paul demonstrate a way to affordably gather real-time data about our health issues. Not only did the pair’s data support similar efforts, like Google’s Flu Tracker, it also generated new knowledge, according to the BBC: It provided an insight into how Twitter users viewed a range of illnesses […]

Search is a hard problem in computing, but it’s a critical problem in real life, as friends of computer scientist Jim Gray found out when he vanished at sea. In July’s issue of the Communications of the ACM, Gray’s friends describe the story of their technical challenges and lessons learned. Gray was famous for many things, including his determination to work with practitioners to transform the practical challenges they faced into scientific questions that could be formalized and addressed by the research community. As the search for Tenacious wound down, a number of us felt that even though the effort was not successful on its own terms, it offered a […]

Crowds are common at rock concerts, basketball games, and scientific research proposals. Wait — what? In The New York Times this week, there’s an interesting story about scientists looking for funding in creative ways: As research budgets tighten at universities and federal financing agencies, a new crop of Web-savvy scientists is hoping the wisdom — and generosity — of the crowds will come to the rescue. While nonprofit science organizations and medical research centers commonly seek donations from the public, Dr. [Jennifer] Calkins, an adjunct professor of biology at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., and Dr. [Jennifer] Gee may have been the first professional scientists to use a generic […]