Steve Lohr from the New York Times published an article today titled, “The Seeds That Federal Money Can Plant,” which explains the importance of federal funding to scientific research and development. The article highlights Luis Von Ahn‘s online service Duolingo. Duolingo, which has over 100,000 users, allows individuals to learn languages via crowdsourcing and seeks to “…translate the entire web into every major language”. The service, which has attracted $15 million in venture capital, was initially supported by a five-year $120,000 per year National Science Foundation (NSF) grant. The article mentions findings in a report published earlier this year by the National Research Council (NRC): That pattern has been repeated countless times […]

Popular Mechanics, the American Magazine which features regular articles on science and technology, released their annual breakthrough awardees earlier this week.  These awards highlight innovations that have the potential to make the world smarter, safer and more efficient. A total of ten awards were announced and at least four of the awardees feature computer science research. Four of these projects are featured below, all awardees are listed on Popular Mechanics’ webpage.   MABEL, Teaching Robots to Walk – Jessy Grizzle, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and Jonathan Hurst, Oregon State University Walking, that fundamental human activity, seems simple: Take one foot, put it in front of the other; repeat. But to […]

A few weeks ago, we blogged about our new “Computing Research in Action” series, which is an expanded version of our “Highlight of the Week” feature. We’ve received several entries so far and will announce our first winner later this month. As a reminder, selected research projects will receive a $1500 travel award from the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) to cover conference travel to present the featured work. If you are working on an exciting research project, and would like to submit an entry for consideration, it’s not too late! Please go to our Computing Research in Action website to fill out a short entry form.

Today at a briefing on Capitol Hill titled, “Big Data, Bigger Opportunities“, hosted by Tech America, The National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced $15 million in funding for Big Data research. These awards come nearly six months after the Obama Administration released it’s substantial R&D initiative in March of this year. The initiative committed more than $200 million in new funding through six agencies and departments to improve the nation’s  “ability to extract knowledge and insights from large and complex collections of digital data.” Subra Suresh, Director of the National Science Foundation: “I am delighted to provide such a positive progress report just six months after fellow […]

The following is a contribution to this blog from Parisa Rashidi, Assistant Professor in the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University. In this blog entry, Dr. Rashidi describes a symposium being held in Arlington, Virginia, November 2-4 2012, titled AI for Gerontechnology, which she is co-chairing.  The aging population, the increasing cost of formal health care, caregiver burden and the importance that older adults place on living independently in their own homes motivate the need for the development of technologies (Gerontechnology) that promote safe independent living. These user-centric technologies need to address various aging related physical and cognitive health problems such as heart disease, diabetes, deterioration of physical function, […]

GNS Healthcare, a healthcare analytics company and Aetna, an American managed health care organization, are collaborating to make use of GNS’ supercomputer “REFS” (Reverse Engineering and Forward Simulation). By using predictive analytics with Aetna claims and other health information, the REFS platform will create data models to help the early identification of metabolic syndrome, which increases the risk of heart disease, stroke and diabetes. To see how REFS works with data and creating models, watch the video below: Read more about the collaboration from the GNS Healthcare press release below: