As we’ve previously blogged, Mozilla and the National Science Foundation (NSF) have teamed up for a challenge, called “Mozilla Ignite“, which focuses on the development of apps for faster, smarter internet of the future. Apps were designed to address needs in advanced manufacturing, education and workforce technologies, emergency preparedness and public safety, healthcare technologies and clean energy and transportation. The brainstorming round completed on August 23rd which brought in over 300 ideas from the community. Mozilla announced a total of eight winners, with one grand prize award. The grand prize winner from the brainstorming round went to Jeremy Cooperstock, director of the Shared Reality Lab at McGill University in Canada. Here […]

Today, the National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded $50 million for research projects designed to help build a secure cyber society and protect the US infrastructure. The awards come from the Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace Program (SaTC), which “builds on [NSF’s] long-term support for a wide range of cutting edge interdisciplinary research and education activities to secure critical infrastructure that is vulnerable to a wide range of threats that challenge its security.” The funded projects include two frontier awards — The first award, titled “Beyond Technical Security: Developing an Empirical Basis for Socio-Economic Perspectives“, is a multi-institution collaboration between Stefan Savage, University of California, San Diego, Vern Paxson, International Computer Science […]

A couple weeks ago, we featured the Institute of Medicine’s (IOM) release of a new landmark study titled Best Care at Lower Cost: The Path to Continuously Learning Health Care in America. One of the recommendations in the report is “to accelerate integration of the best clinical knowledge into care decisions.” IBM’s Watson, the supercomputing system that topped the world’s best human players at Jeopardy! last spring, is one example of leveraging advances in computer science to accelerate knowledge into healthcare decisions. As we’ve noted here previously, not only can Watson operate at the speed of 80 teraflops, but it can also over time learn which algorithms to run in which situations. The obvious example of […]

The following is a contribution to this blog from Robin Murphy, Raytheon Professor of Computer Science and Engineering and director of the Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue at Texas A&M University. Back in April, Robin co-organized a visioning workshop about the role of computing in disaster management (including preparedness, prevention, response, and recovery). In this blog entry, Robin describes her participation at a workshop held last week in DC on Connecting Grassroots to Government for Disaster Management.  I participated in the Wilson Center’s workshop on Connecting Grassroots to Government for Disaster Management last week where I briefed 60 physical and 150 remote participants on the NSF/CCC Workshop on Computing for Disaster Management and the subsequent […]

Every week for the last several years, the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) has showcased an interesting computing (or related) research project as a “Highlight of the Week.” Today, in an effort to build upon the success of the Highlight feature, we are announcing an expanded version of this series called “Computing Research in Action.”

We’ve blogged extensively in this space over the last few months about the promise of Big Data science and engineering, including stories describing how very large data sets coupled with predictive analytics capabilities are transforming the way we use e-readers or leverage medical records to drive advances in healthcare. Now here’s an interesting new angle — the world of sports. For all you tennis fans out there, IBM has launched a new analytics tool at this year’s US Open — SlamTracker — to help individuals better understand what’s happening on the courts in Flushing, NY. SlamTracker uses nearly 40 million data points from five years of Grand Slam tournaments to analyze and present each competitor’s performance styles and patterns […]