The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has partnered with London-based Wellcome Trust and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) to launch a global science competition for new products to advance “open science,” a movement to make scientific research data broadly accessible to the public. From the NIH news release: The volume of digital information generated by biomedical research often called “big data” is growing at a rapidly increasing pace. Researchers’ ability to derive knowledge from data is hindered by their ability to find, access and use it. The goal of the Open Science Prize is to support the development and prototyping of services, tools and platforms to overcome these hurdles to ensure data […]

A few month ago we blogged about the on-going robotic debate, Are robots our friends?  This seems to be the question of the year, if not the decade, as digital technology continues to advance. What does this mean for humanity and our workforce? Recently, the New York Times posted an interesting article with a surprising conclusion which claims that “New Research Says Robots Are Unlikely to Eat Our Jobs.” In the article they discuss a new study out by the McKinsey Global Institute, called “A Labor Market That Works: Connecting Talent With Opportunity in the Digital Age,” which states: By 2025, McKinsey estimates, these digital talent platforms could add $2.7 trillion a year to […]

The National Science Foundation (NSF) Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) is pleased to announce a Distinguished Lecture on Thursday, April 9, 2015 at 2:30 pm EST by Dr. Arogyaswami J. Paulraj titled Multiple Antenna Wireless – An Enduring Frontier. Dr. Paulraj is an Emeritus Professor (Research) at Stanford University. After a 25 year R&D career with the Indian Navy, Paulraj joined Stanford University in 1991. He proposed the MIMO (Multiple Input Multiple Output) concept in 1992 which is the key to today’s 4G cellular and WiFi wireless networks. Abstract:    Multiple antenna (MIMO) wireless technology has been a spectacular success. MIMO is embedded both into 4G cellular and WiFi systems with many billions of devices […]

The National Institute of Health (NIH) is determined to reduce the cost and time it takes to discover viable therapeutic targets, which drive the changes in the molecular networks leading to the signs and symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease. NIH is leading the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and various other industry and academic scientists in a public-private partnership effort to create a Big Data portal for Alzheimer’s drug discovery. This Accelerating Medicine Partnership for Alzheimer’s disease (AMP-AD) Knowledge Portal is public so it will enable sharing, transparency, reproducibility, and analysis of large biomedical datasets. The hope is that it will shorten the time between discovery of potential drug targets to development […]

Contributions to this post were made by Lorenzo Alvisi, Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council Member and Professor in the Department of Computer Science at UT Austin and Robbert van Renesse, Principal Research Scientist in the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University.  Imagine slipping into a presentation that has already started and finding a seat in the back. The speaker is pointing at her slides explaining the diagram but you can barely hear her from the back of the room. All the sudden your cell phone, which you had placed on the table when you took your seat, begins to project the speaker’s voice. Now you can watch the speaker and […]

The AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellows at the National Science Foundation (NSF) have organized a new seminar series on Data Science, Big Data, and Internet of Things. The series is a monthly one-hour informational presentation that is open for all to attend in person or online. Michael Franklin from UC Berkeley will be the inaugural speaker tomorrow, Wednesday January 21, from 11:30am to 12:30pm EST. Franklin is the Thomas M. Siebel Professor of Computer Science and Chair of the Computer Science Division of the EECS Department at UC Berkeley. He is director of the Berkeley AMPLab, a 70+ person effort fusing scalable computing, machine learning, and human computation to make sense […]