The National Library of Medicine (NLM), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), recently published a Federal Register Notice for a national Pill Image Recognition Challenge. NLM seeks YOUR input in developing high-quality algorithms and software that rank known images of prescription pills in the NLM RxIMAGE database by similarity to consumer-quality images of unknown prescription pills. NLM plans to use the submissions in creating a future software system and Application Programming Interface (API) that can be used in identifying an unknown prescription pill from a photo taken of that pill by a smart phone. Parties wishing to participate in the Challenge are provided with a training data set. The submission […]

The National Science Foundation (NSF) Director France A. Córdova outlined President Obama’s fiscal year (FY) 2017 budget request to Congress for NSF. The FY17 request calls for $8 billion for NSF, an increase of 6.7 percent or about $500 million over the enacted FY16 budget. Funding priorities for FY2017 include research that addresses issues of major scientific and societal importance. For example: Clean Energy Technologies would receive $512 million, an increase of $141 million over FY2016. Understanding the Brain would receive $142 million in FY2017. Innovations at the Nexus of Food, Energy and Water Systems (INFEWS) would receive $62 million. Risk and Resilience would receive $43 million. This is a research portfolio […]

President Obama just announced his plan to implement a Cybersecurity National Action Plan (CNAP) that will take near-term actions and put in place a long-term strategy to enhance cybersecurity awareness, protect privacy, maintain public safety, and empower Americans to take better control of their digital security. The Administration also released the 2016 Federal Cybersecurity Research and Development Strategic Plan, which was coordinated by the National Science and Technology Council. All of this follows in the momentum of the December passage of the Cybersecurity Act of 2015, which makes it easier for private companies to share cyber threat information with each other and the Government. CNAP is the capstone of more than seven years of determined […]

Well, that was a whopper! The Washington, DC area received its first blizzard in many years this past weekend. For a city that normally only receives 15.4 inches of snow spread out over an entire season, the two plus feet of snow has been overwhelming for the city. DC is not equipped to handle this amount of snow. But, we were warned. And, for the most part, the weather forecasters were right on target. All thanks to amazing computer models that predicted the storms path and total accumulation with stellar accuracy 8 days before the storm hit the region. This was highlighted by the Washington Post: This forecast success would […]

This post was contributed by Shashi Shekhar, Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council member and Distinguished University Professor at the University of Minnesota.  National Science Foundation (NSF) in partnership with U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA)/National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) recently issued the awaited INFEWS solicitation 16-524 with a budget of $50M. Proposals are due in late March, 2016. It’s estimated number of awards is between 22 and 40 across four tracks, namely, FEW system modeling, Visualization and Decision Support, Innovative Systems Solutions and Education/Workforce Development. Computing topics show up in all tracks and quite frequently in the second track. Synopsis: Humanity is reliant upon the physical resources and natural systems of the Earth […]

Contributions to this post were made by Gregory Hager, Chair of the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) and Professor of Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University and Martin Weiner, AAAS Science & Technology Policy Fellow in the Directorate for Computer & Information Science & Engineering Directorate at NSF.  Recently, the organizers of the CCC workshop on Research Interfaces between Brain Science and Computer Science were invited to present their workshop report at the National Science Foundation (NSF). Jack Gallant (UC Berkeley), Polina Golland (MIT) and Greg Hager (CCC Chair, JHU) gave the presentation and led surrounding discussions. The Research Interfaces between Brain Science and Computer Science workshop was held December 2014 in […]