We’ve featured lots of stories about Big Data over the last several months, but here’s a fascinating new one that illustrates the value of Big Data analytics in addressing important national priorities. Researchers at SENSEable City Lab — a new research initiative of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — together with colleagues at GE Healthymagination have analyzed data from over 7 million electronic medical records, illustrating in a powerful visual the (sometimes surprising) relationships between medical conditions on the basis of the frequency of co-occurrences. They’re calling this extensive disease network the “Health InfoScape.” When you have heartburn, do you also feel nauseous? Or if you’re experiencing insomnia, do you tend to put on a […]

There’s a great article in this week’s Nature — out this afternoon — featuring computer scientists like Cornell’s Jon Kleinberg, Harvard’s David Lazer (now at Northeastern), and Columbia’s Duncan Watts, who are leveraging today’s digital data streams (e.g., e-mail, social media, mobile devices, etc.) to transform the way we study social science. Here’s an excerpt about their pioneering efforts in computational social science: Jon Kleinberg’s early work was not for the mathematically faint of heart. His first publication1, in 1992, was a computer-science paper with contents as dense as its title: ‘On dynamic Voronoi diagrams and the minimum Hausdorff distance for point sets under Euclidean motion in the plane’.   That was before the World-Wide Web […]

On Monday, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) announced a Sept. 27 Proposers’ Day for its Foundational Cyberwarfare program, a new initiative that will seek “to create revolutionary technologies for understanding, planning, and managing cyberwarfare in real-time, large-scale, and dynamic network environments.” Codenamed “Plan X,” the initiative will also support “novel research into the nature of cyberwarfare and support development of fundamental strategies and tactics needed to dominate the cyber battlespace.” The Proposers’ Day comes in advance of the formal request for proposals, which is anticipated in late September. According to the notice, “DARPA seeks innovative research in four key areas in support of Plan X” (following the link):

The Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) Office of National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) — which in fall 2009 launched the Strategic Health IT Advanced Research Projects (SHARP) Program, providing funding to four teams pursuing research to generate new knowledge and innovations enabling “the meaningful use of health IT and a high-performing, adaptive, nationwide health care system” — is out with an interesting video (after the jump) describing what advances in computing mean for the healthcare system of the future. The video, accompanied by a new web portal, HealthIT.gov, touches on some of the themes captured by the Computing Community Consortium’s (CCC) October 2009 workshop on discovery […]

Earlier this week, the National Science Foundation (NSF) issued a Dear Colleague Letter (DCL) announcing a new international collaboration in computational neuroscience. Together with France’s Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR), NSF is seeking U.S.-French collaborative research projects that will advance the state of the art in computational neuroscience. The submission deadline is Nov. 2nd. Per the DCL: Rapid advances in empirical methods, together with powerful mathematical and computational techniques, and an unprecedented ability to store and analyze large quantities of data, place computational neuroscience at the threshold of paradigm-shifting discoveries. Computational neuroscience thrives from integrating expertise across multiple disciplines and, therefore, is well suited for funding mechanisms specifically designed to foster […]

“On the Edge — The Future of Computing Research” was the title of a plenary session at the Computing Research Association’s (CRA) biennial Conference at Snowbird last month. And it’s a consistent theme of CRA’s Computing Community Consortium (CCC). Here’s the pitch: Our field has exhibited an ever-changing balance of “technology push” and “demand pull” over the years. Many currently sense a movement of the pendulum in the “demand pull” direction. I’d like to argue that this is fantastic — it’s great news for our field, great news for society, and great news for the future (read more following the link…).