Last week, the UC Berkeley’s School of Information held a forum — called the DataEDGE Conference — seeking to explore the challenges and opportunities associated with the transition to a data-intensive economy. One of the speakers was danah boyd, Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research and an Assistant Professor at New York University, who discussed the implications of Big Data on privacy — and the role for researchers and technologists moving forward. The New York Times‘ Bits Blog has coverage of boyd’s talk: “Privacy is a source of tremendous tension and anxiety in Big Data,” says Danah Boyd, a senior researcher at Microsoft Research. Speaking last week at a conference on Big Data at the University of […]

The National Institute of Standards and Technology’s (NIST) Information Technology Laboratory (ITL) has announced plans to hold a workshop on its Gaithersburg, MD, campus next week — Wednesday and Thursday, June 13 and 14 — exploring “key national priority topics” in support of the Federal government’s recently-announced Big Data R&D Initiative. The BIG DATA Workshop is free and open to all, but attendees must pre-register online by this Wednesday, June 6th in order to clear security. According to NIST/ITL (following the link):

Beginning at 1pm EDT this afternoon, the World Science Festival — an annual celebration and exploration of science, culture, and art that’s taking place all across New York City this week  — will stream live from New York University’s Skirball Center for the Performing Arts a 90-minute session titled “Internet Everywhere: The Future of History’s Most Disruptive Technology”: Disruptive technologies uproot culture, can precipitate wars and even topple empires. By this measure, human history has seen nothing like the Internet. Pioneers of the digital revolution examine the Internet’s brief but explosive history and reveal nascent projects that will shortly reinvent how we interact with technology — and each other. From social upheaval […]

A number of news outlets have begun covering Plan X, a new five-year, $110 million cyberwarfare research program that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) expects to launch this summer. According to The Washington Post, which broke the news earlier this week: The Pentagon is turning to the private sector, universities and even computer-game companies as part of an ambitious effort to develop technologies to improve its cyberwarfare capabilities, launch effective attacks and withstand the likely retaliation.   The previously unreported effort, which its authors have dubbed Plan X, marks a new phase in the nation’s fledgling military operations in cyberspace, which have focused more on protecting the Defense Department’s computer systems than on […]

In April, the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) commissioned members of the computer architecture research community to generate a short report to help guide strategic thinking in this space.  The effort aimed to complement and synthesize other recent documents, including the CCC’s Advancing Computer Architecture Research (ACAR) visioning reports and a study by the National Academies.  Today, the CCC is releasing the resultant community white paper, 21st Century Computer Architecture: Information and communication technology (ICT) is transforming our world, including healthcare, education, science, commerce, government, defense, and entertainment. It is hard to remember that 20 years ago the first step in information search involved a trip to the library, 10 years ago social networks […]

Mobiledia is out this week with an interesting article about “Big Data”: Technology is improving Siri, powering driverless cars, improving cancer treatment and even being called Big Brother. But “big data” is what makes it possible, and why it’s so important.   Big data refers to the analytic algorithms applied to vast amounts of data across several different places, or simply the math and computer formulas used to sift through massive amounts of data and analyze the results to answer questions and solve problems. The edge big data has over traditional analytics is its ability to include data types that aren’t organized in tabular formats, including written documents, images and […]