The following Great Innovative Idea is from Mark Bernstein, the chief scientist at Eastgate Systems, Inc and Clare Hooper, an Independent Scholar in Vancouver, BC, Canada. Mark and Clare were winners at the recent Computing Community Consortium (CCC) sponsored Blue Sky Ideas Conference Track at the 29TH ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media, July 9-12, 2018 in Baltimore, MD. Their paper is called “A Villain’s Guide To Social Media And Web Science.” The Idea The great power and profitability of social media may not benefit the good and the bad alike; increasing evidence indicates that recent advances in data mining, social media, and web science all asymmetrically benefit the cruel, the dishonest, and the tyrant. Daily headlines reflect the appropriation and misuse of […]

The following is a letter from Dr. Valarie Browning, the Office Director in the Defense Science Office (DSO) at the Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). See the full summer 2018 newsletter here. Earlier this year, on February 7, 2018, DARPA quietly celebrated 60 years of innovation in support of national security. The Defense Sciences Office (DSO), the oldest of the current DARPA Tech Offices, has been identifying and creating scientific discovery to fuel innovation throughout the Agency for much of DARPA’s history. With the upcoming formal DARPA 60th Anniversary Symposium just around the corner, it’s a good time to reflect on where DSO has been and where we are going. […]

The following is from Sonynka Ngosso from the Office of Strategic Coordination at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) announcing their new STRIDES (Science and Technology Research Infrastructure for Discovery, Experimentation, and Sustainability Initiative) initiative.  Dear Colleagues, Today NIH launched a new initiative to harness the power of commercial cloud computing and provide NIH biomedical researchers access to the most advanced, cost-effective computational infrastructure, tools, and services available.  The STRIDES (Science and Technology Research Infrastructure for Discovery, Experimentation, and Sustainability Initiative) Initiative counts Google Cloud as its first industry partner. In line with NIH’s first-ever Data Science Strategic Plan released in June, STRIDES will establish additional innovative public-private partnerships to broaden access to services and tools, including training for researchers […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) will hold a workshop from January 3rd to 5th, 2019 in Hawaii to create a vision for thermodynamic computing, a statement of research needs, and a summary of the current state of understanding of this new area. Workshop attendance will be by invitation only and travel expenses will be available for select participants. We seek short white papers to help create the agenda for the workshop and select attendees. Thermodynamics has a long history in the engineering of computing systems due to its role in power consumption, scaling, and device performance [1],[2]. In a different context, thermodynamically motivated algorithmic techniques are prevalent and highly successful […]

The following is from Sonynka Ngosso from the Office of Strategic Coordination at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) announcing the new Big Data to Knowledge Reserouces Page.  Dear Colleagues,   Big Data to Knowledge (BD2K) grantees developed a series of resources for the biomedical research and data science communities to use big data to answer biomedical research questions. Under current efforts to make the products of BD2K research usable, discoverable, and disseminated to the biomedical research community, the NIH Office of Strategic Coordination (OSC) released a webpage with direct hyperlinks to the resources developed through BD2K funding (https://commonfund.nih.gov/bd2k/resources).   The BD2K resource page will be updated periodically and populated with new resources as they become available. Please […]

The following Great Innovative Idea is from Mark Bernstein, the chief scientist at Eastgate Systems, Inc. Mark was one of the winners at the recent Computing Community Consortium (CCC) sponsored Blue Sky Ideas Conference Track at the 29TH ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media, July 9-12, 2018 in Baltimore, MD. His paper is called “As We May Hear: Our Slaves of Steel II.” The Idea Everyone’s everyday knowledge work is increasingly tied up with personal agents that one gradually trains to help in the work. In the paper, we imagine a restaurant host (or a diplomatic aide) working with a chorus of audio advisors to identify patrons (or diplomats) and to identify their needs and preferences. Though audio hypertext […]