(This post has been updated; please scroll below for the latest!) Since the dawn of the digital age, fundamental research sponsored by the Federal government has supported U.S. leadership in information technology — from the first supercomputers, to the foundations of high-speed networking, to global positioning systems and wireless technologies. Much of the progress in the last 20 years has been enabled by the Federal Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) Program, the oldest and largest of a small number of formal Federal programs that engage multiple agencies. This Thursday, the Computing Community Consortium (CCC), working with the National Coordination Office (NCO) for NITRD, will mark two decades of the NITRD Program at a daylong Symposium to […]

Microsoft’s Technology Policy Group (TPG) has announced a new internship program that will offer “a limited number of internships to exceptional candidates interested in helping characterize the long-term policy implications of disruptive technologies.” The program — which entails a separate application and selection process from the long-running Microsoft Research Internship Program — aims to place policy-minded graduate students in computing or related fields in paid internships at Microsoft’s Redmond, WA, campus for 12 weeks this summer. According to the announcement: TPG is charged with exploring how disruptive technologies affect Microsoft’s business outlook and policy landscape in key areas such as Internet Governance, Wireless Spectrum Management, Next Generation Networks, 21st Century Research Universities, […]

The National Science Foundation (NSF) yesterday released a report on its support for cloud computing, describing the outcomes of “investments in cloud computing research, recommendations for research focus and program improvements, and other related recommendations.” Emphasizing the role of cloud computing — “a vital area of national importance that requires further research and development” — the report highlights some of the 125 cloud computing research awards issued by NSF’s Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) directorate between 2009 and 2011, spanning areas of architecture, algorithms, big data, security and privacy, green computing, and so on. Among these are the set of awards enabled by a partnership between NSF and Microsoft over […]

The Bipartisan Policy Center released a report last Friday — Transforming Health Care: The Role of Health IT — emphasizing the critically important role that health information technology plays “in supporting new models of care and payment designed to achieve health care’s triple aim” of improving health, improving the experience of care for patients and families, and reducing the cost of care. In the report — whose contributors include leading health care experts from around the country — the Bipartisan Policy Center concludes, “despite the introduction of IT to nearly every other aspect of modern life, the U.S. health care system remains largely paper-based.” The report identifies six common attributes regarding health […]

USA TODAY is out this week with an interesting article featuring the work of MacArthur Foundation Fellow Constance Steinkuehler, an Assistant Professor in the Educational Communications & Technology program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison — who’s on assignment for 18 months as a Senior Policy Analyst at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) to study video games that improve health, education, civic engagement and the environment, among other areas. According to the USA TODAY piece: If you’re training for a new job someday soon with a video game controller in your hands, thank Constance Steinkuehler.   This summer, when your kids’ favorite science museum boasts a new augmented-reality […]

Back in November, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) issued two Requests for Information (RFI) soliciting broad public input about “the long-term preservation of, and public access to, the results of Federally-funded research, including digital data and peer-reviewed scholarly publications.” Now this week, OSTP has posted the comments that it received — from scientists, citizens, publishers, scientific societies, libraries, and others. According to the OSTP Blog (follow the link):