The President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) heard this morning from Susan L. Graham (UC Berkeley and the Computing Community Consortium), Peter Lee (Microsoft Research), and David E. Shaw (D.E. Shaw & Co.), co-chairs of a small PCAST working group assessing the status and direction of the nation’s Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) program. The objectives of the working group, which is producing a short update to the comprehensive report on the NITRD program that PCAST issued in December 2010 as required by law, are three-fold: to understand what has transpired in the nearly two years since the last report (both in terms of policy and technological advances), […]

Updated Friday, Sept. 7 at 12:45pm EDT: The National Science Foundation (NSF) has issued a statement this afternoon further describing the realignment plans (emphasis added): The National Science Foundation (NSF) yesterday announced plans to realign four program offices in the Office of the Director to maximize research and education outcomes for science and engineering, while enhancing NSF’s operational agility. The proposed organizational changes include:   The Office of Cyberinfrastructure would become a division within the Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering. The Office of Polar Programs would become a division within the Directorate for Geosciences. The Office of International Science and Engineering would be merged with the Office of Integrative Activities, […]

Moments ago, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) of the National Academies released what promises to become a landmark study — Best Care at Lower Cost: The Path to Continuously Learning Health Care in America — comprehensively laying the foundation for a learning health care system that links personal and population data to researchers, practitioners, and patients, thereby “dramatically enhancing the knowledge base on effectiveness of interventions and providing real-time guidance for superior care in treating and preventing illness.” The report presents “a vision of what is possible if the nation applies the resources and tools at hand by marshaling science, information technology, incentives, and care culture to transform effectiveness and efficacy of care.” What’s most […]

In a recent article in The New York Times, the newspaper’s technology writer John Markoff describes how advances in robotics have created new opportunities for automation, citing several examples where improved capabilities and reduced cost are changing the value proposition to industry. As is inevitable, these advances are juxtaposed against the impact on employment — in bald terms, will robots put people out of work?

The following is a special contribution to this blog by Louiqa Raschid, a professor in the School of Business, Institute for Advanced Computer Studies, Department of Computer Science, and Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology at the University of Maryland, and H.V. Jagadish, Bernard A. Galler Collegiate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Michigan. Louiqa and Jag co-organized a workshop on next-generational financial cyberinfrastructure on July 18-19. Earlier this month, experts in computer science as well as finance gathered outside Washington, DC, to consider the need for a new financial cyberinfrastructure, and to elucidate the computing research challenges that are arising in this increasingly interdisciplinary space. Participants were drawn […]

The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has issued a Request for Information (RFI), “seeking ideas and input from the public … on successful strategies and remaining challenges in the creation of health IT-enabled quality measure development and reporting.” Comments are due by Aug. 20th. Among the questions regarding quality measurement enabled by health IT being posed in the RFI are (following the link):