What would you do with a 1 Gbps, layer 2 programmable, sliceable network? That’s the central question underlying the US Ignite Gigabit Applications Workshop, a daylong meeting co-hosted by the NSF’s CISE Directorate and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) early last week. The workshop — supported by several other Federal agencies as well as a number of public and private partners — brought together over 80 individuals from colleges/universities, for-profit companies, non-profit organizations, and Federal, state, and local governments from across the country. About US Ignite Recent investments in broadband (>100 Mbps up and down) in highly innovative cities and regions across the country are […]

A number of agencies within the NIH have come together to announce a one-day meeting on “Crowdsourcing: The Art and Science of Open Innovation,” to be held on the NIH grounds in Bethesda, MD, July 18, 2011.  The goal of the meeting is to lay the foundation for running successful challenges in biomedical and health research. Specifically, the meeting will: explore new ways to incentivize innovation in biomedical research with the prize authority recently given to all Federal agencies by Congress. The meeting will focus on the key aspects of this new approach that include: how to identify problems that can be solved through open innovation; how to communicate a scientific […]

The Computing Research Association recently published the results of its annual Taulbee Survey, and the numbers of PostDocs rose to record levels, continuing a trend that we have witnessed for more than a decade — and bringing new meaning to the CRA’s PostDoc white paper effort. Background As we have blogged here before, CRA — the umbrella organization of the CCC — initiated an effort last fall to engage the community in a conversation about PostDocs, at a time when a growing number of new CS PhDs appeared to be going that route. A committee commissioned by CRA prepared a white paper reporting the statistics associated with academic and industry […]

The NSF, NIH, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and McKesson Foundation announced this week a call for white papers on innovative methods to accelerate the evaluation of the efficacy and safety of mobile health technologies — in anticipation of a workshop later this year that will serve as the basis for defining a research agenda for evaluation of mHealth technology: Mobile health (mHealth) has the potential to simultaneously reduce the cost of health care and improve our health by encouraging healthy behaviors, providing continuous monitoring to prevent or reduce health problems, reducing acute health care visits, and providing personalized, real-time intervention in the mobile environment. However, traditional methods of evaluation needed to address efficacy and safety in mHealth are […]

The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) — which last year announced four $60 million Strategic Health IT Advanced Research Projects (SHARP) — is seeking public comment on its Federal Health IT Strategic Plan for 2011-2015: The Plan starts in 2011, the year when medical care entered a new era — the age of meaningful use. This new era creates opportunities to transform the health care system by improving the flow of information through health IT. Meaningful use is currently aimed at widespread adoption and information exchange, and ultimately at improving health care outcomes. The Plan demonstrates how we will build off the foundation of meaningful use to […]

I’ve just returned from Japan advising the “Mt. Fuji” team on UAVs for the Fukushima nuclear situation and I’ll be going back next week with a team of experts and robots to assist several prefectures with tsunami damage inspection and the grim task of underwater victim recovery.  (Read more about this in The New York Times.)  This will be the Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue’s (CRASAR) twelfth response since the first use of rescue robots at the 9/11 World Trade Center collapse just short of a decade ago. What has changed in rescue robotics in the last 10 years?  The robots, of course!  Rescue robots originally meant small ground vehicles […]