The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has joined forces with George Mason University to launch the Innovation House Study, seeking to foster “radical, novel” approaches to extract meaningful content from visual and geospatial data. Teams will qualify for up to $50,000 in funding, will meet daily in Arlington, Virginia, during an intense eight-week work period, and will have access to unclassified aerial and ground-level video, high-resolution LiDAR of urban and mountainous terrain, and unstructured amateur photos and videos. Emphasis will be placed on collaboration, not competition. According to the request for proposals: The DARPA Innovation House is a study into the feasibility of effective software design and development in a short-fuse, crucible-style living […]

Organizers of the second annual symposium on Meaningful Use of Complex Medical Data (MUCMD) — to be held in Los Angeles in mid-August — have announced a call for participation. The symposium seeks to bring together computer scientists, systems engineers, clinicians, and others “to explore the opportunities and challenges introduced by the growing abundance of digital data captured during the delivery of clinical care.” From the call for participation: Every day hospitals and clinics around the world collect data from tens of thousands of practical therapeutic experiments in electronic health care records (EHRs), and the collective experience recorded in this data has potential to revolutionize the delivery of care, drive new […]

(This post has been updated; please scroll down for the latest.) The Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) has announced plans for a daylong event this fall marking its 60th anniversary. The conference and exhibit — titled “A Force of Discovery: 60 Years of Air Force Basic Research” — will take place in Arlington, Virginia, on Friday, October 12th, and aims to “offer significant potential for enhanced collaboration and relationship building.” According to AFOSR (following the jump):

We’ve previously covered Internet pioneer and California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (CalIT2) founding director Larry Smarr’s decade-long quest to pursue personal health instrumentation — and there’s another great article in this month’s Atlantic shedding light on Smarr’s work, as well as his thinking about the future of healthcare (emphasis added): He is not a doctor or a biochemist, he’s a computer scientist — one of the early architects of the Internet, in fact. Today he directs a world-class research center on two University of California campuses, San Diego and Irvine, called the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, or “Calit2” (the 2 represents the repeated I and T initials). The future is arriving faster at Calit2 than it […]

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has issued a new solicitation for its 2013 Director’s Transformative Research Awards, which will support “exceptionally innovative, original, and/or unconventional research with the potential to create new scientific paradigms, establish largely new and improved clinical approaches, or develop transformative technologies.” Unlike many other NIH R01 competitions, “little or no preliminary data [are] expected.” The Transformative Research Awards are funded through NIH’s Common Fund, which includes among its broad themes “computational and informatics challenges.” According to the solicitation (following the link; emphasis added):

At The Wall Street Journal’s annual CFO Network Conference in Washington, DC, last week, inventor and entrepreneur Ray Kurzweil spoke about “frontiers in technology,” discussing, among other topics, recent advances in artificial intelligence — and what they might mean for the future of the field. During his comments, Kurzweil referenced the Turing test and made an interesting prediction (emphasis added): “Alan Turing in 1950 defined a way in which we can say that a computer is operating at human levels. You have a human judge interview a computer and a human — maybe several of each. If the judge can’t tell which is which, we say the computers have passed the Turing test. […]