The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has issued several solicitations in recent weeks focused on health information technology R&D. AHRQ appears to be taking a fairly broad view of health IT: Health IT is broadly defined as the use of information and communication technology in health care to support the delivery of patient or population care or to support patient self-management.  Health IT can support patient care related activities such as order communications, results reporting, care planning and clinical or health documentation (Shortliffe EH and JJ Cimino, “Biomedical Informatics: Computer Applications in Health Care and Biomedicine.” Third Edition. 2006).  […]

A quick break from the usual sorts of posts in this space: The Computing Community Consortium launched this blog three years ago as a way to promote discussion — about research directions, funding programs, etc. — throughout the computing research community. Today — 234 posts later — the blog has been seen at least 100,000 times. Thanks to everyone who’s visited this website over the past several years! In the very first post on this blog, Peter Lee and Andrew McCallum described the objective — derived from the goals of the CCC: Brainstorming, discussing and driving “longer range, audacious research challenges” is the job of the entire community, and the CCC is […]

(This post has been updated; please scroll down for the latest.) Back in late April, the CCC announced a call for short videos describing exciting research and results in computer science — with the goal of communicating to undergraduates what computing research is all about. Today I’m pleased to present the first of these videos — called Exploring Photobios — in what I hope will become a continuing feature on this blog. This video comes from Steven Seitz’s group in the Graphics and Imaging Laboratory at University of Washington Computer Science & Engineering. All of us are photographed thousands of times over our lifetimes. Taken together, these photos form a visual record for each of […]

Updated Friday, June 17, 9:03am EDT: NPR has picked up this story, reporting on today’s “Morning Edition” how the research being pursued by Michael Zink et al. at UMass-Amherst could lead to advanced warning systems that reduce the numbers of deaths arising from severe weather outbreaks. Check out the NPR feature (which includes audio): “Advanced Tornado Technology Could Reduce Deaths.” The original blog entry from earlier this week appears below… … There’s a very timely story in today’s Boston Globe featuring the work of Michael Zink and his colleagues at UMass-Amherst, who are developing — with funding from the NSF — a better severe weather warning system that gives geographically […]

I’m just back from a great workshop on US Ignite and GigU, held at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland this week. I sat in on the US Ignite track — and got to hear many excellent presentations from folks with exciting ideas (and teams at the ready!) for developing gigabit applications. Each team summarized the novelty of their idea(s), how ultra-broadband connectivity is key to success, feasibility, benefits, and metrics for evaluation. In many cases, the ideas and teams emerged from a brainstorming session that took place during the first US Ignite workshop held in Washington, DC, on May 16 — just under a month ago. Areas of particular emphasis […]

There’s a great article in today’s New York Times describing the recent rise in enrollments in computer science — spurred in part by “Hollywood’s portrayal of the tech world, as well as celebrity entrepreneurs like Steven P. Jobs of Apple and [Mark] Zuckerberg [of Facebook] who make products that students use every day.” On the rise in enrollments: The number of computer science degrees awarded in the United States began rising in 2010, and will reach 11,000 this year, after plummeting each year since the end of the dot-com bubble in 2004, according to the Computing Research Association, which tracks enrollment and degrees… The number of students who are pursuing the degree […]