At an event in Washington, DC, on Tuesday, the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) released results of its first Quadrennial Technology Review (QTR) — launched earlier this year at the recommendation of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) to help the Department identify a set of priorities for its energy technology R&D activities. As Energy Secretary Steven Chu noted: Traditionally, the Department’s energy strategy has been organized along individual program lines and based on annual budgets. With this QTR, we bind together multiple energy technologies, as well as multiple DoE energy technology programs, in the common purpose of solving our energy challenges. In addition, this QTR provides a multi-year framework […]

This month’s Communications of the ACM features a great piece about improving — and transforming — our nation’s healthcare system through the development of an information technology ecosystem: …[Health] information technology need not be limited to doctor’s visits and lab tests. [A report by the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) last December] envisions a more comprehensive, lifelong record that includes not only treatment history but also a genetic profile, psychological characteristics, behavior patterns, and exposures to risks that might be relevant to health. While such a record could benefit individual patients, it could provide even greater value when stripped of personally identifying information, combined with similar records, and […]

The following is a special contribution to this blog by Karsten Steinhaeuser, a Research Associate in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Minnesota involved with a National Science Foundation Expeditions in Computing on Understanding Climate Change: A Data Driven Approach and the Planetary Skin Institute. Karsten describes the Expeditions effort here. Climate change is a defining environmental challenge facing our planet as rising temperatures, increased severity and frequency of extreme events, and transformation of the global ecosystems are placing unprecedented stress on society, natural resources and man-made infrastructure. A team of researchers led by Vipin Kumar at the University of Minnesota is exploring ways in which computer scientists can help answer […]

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), and National Institutes of Health (NIH) have issued solicitations in recent days with computational elements: IARPA’s Open Source Indicators (OSI) Announcement: IARPA is seeking novel approaches for aggregating publicly available data for use in predicting future events. According to the broad agency announcement: Many significant societal events are preceded and/or followed by population-level changes in communication, consumption, and movement. Some of these changes may be indirectly observable from publicly available data, such as web search queries, blogs, micro-blogs, internet traffic, financial markets, traffic webcams, Wikipedia edits, and many others. Published research has found that some of these data […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) — a standing committee of CRA that seeks to catalyze and empower the computing research community to pursue audacious, high-impact research — has issued a call for proposals for workshop programs that will define visions and agendas for exciting frontiers of computing research. From the solicitation: Successful [workshop] programs will ultimately articulate and mobilize community support for a research vision(s), with the intention of generating support from funding agencies. Proposals are encouraged across the full spectrum of work in the creation and application of information technologies to important challenges, from the theoretical to the practical. Awards can range from $10,000 to $200,000. (Proposers are encouraged […]

From msnbc.com’s Cosmic Log: Video-game players have solved a molecular puzzle that stumped scientists for years, and those scientists say the accomplishment could point the way to crowdsourced cures for AIDS and other diseases.   “This is one small piece of the puzzle in being able to help with AIDS,” Firas Khatib, a biochemist at the University of Washington, told me. Khatib is the lead author of a research paper on the project, published today by Nature Structural & Molecular Biology.   The feat, which was accomplished using a collaborative online game called Foldit, is also one giant leap for citizen science — a burgeoning field that enlists Internet users to look for alien planets, decipher ancient […]