The following is a special contribution to this blog from Cui Tao and Matt-Mouley Bouamrane, the organizing chairs of the First International Workshop on Managing Interoperability and compleXity in Health Systems, which was held in October 2011 in Scotland (U.K.). We were delighted to host a successful Vision and Challenge Track at the First International Workshop on Managing Interoperability and compleXity in Health Systems. MIXHS 2011 was a forum focused on recent research and technical results in knowledge management and information systems in bio-medical and electronic health systems. The workshop was designed to provide an opportunity for sharing practical experiences and best practices in e-Health information infrastructure development and management. Of particular interest to the […]

In The Washington Post yesterday: Modern technological advances have sparked many concerns that supercomputers, robots and other sophisticated machinery will soon erase the need for skilled workers, especially in industries like manufacturing and construction, perhaps driving the nation’s unemployment rate even higher in the years ahead.   Similarly, Americans’ increasing dependence on technology, ranging from constant computer use to around-the-clock interaction with mobile phones, has prompted many observers and academics to question whether the line separating people and technology is blurring in an all too dangerous manner.   On Monday, Google Chairman Eric Schmidt offered words to mollify those concerns [after the jump].  

Earlier this month, the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Directorate for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences (SBE) released a new report — Rebuilding the Mosaic: Fostering Research in the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences at the National Science Foundation in the Next Decade — representing the results of a year-long visioning process assessing the directorate’s existing research investments and identifying important research directions for the future. What’s interesting is that the report, which is based on 252 white paper submissions from 240 authors (received through an open submission process) specifically touts “an interdisciplinary, data-intensive, and collaborative vision for the future of SBE research” — one that necessitates new partnerships and synergies between social […]

The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) is out with a request for information (RFI) this month, seeking input on “a possible future IARPA investment (such as a program or grand challenge)” in automatic machine learning: Machine learning (ML) is used extensively in application areas of interest to IARPA including speech, language, vision, sensor processing, and multi-modal integration. Typically, expert practitioners in ML select appropriate architectures and algorithms for the application domain, performance requirements, and data characteristics of the problem at hand. Additionally, they engineer an appropriate set of features to be extracted from the data for use in the system design. Then, depending on the problem, data may be […]

In addition to Tuesday’s special Science Times describing the future of computing, The New York Times has featured several other articles this week about cutting-edge work in the field. For instance, yesterday, the Times covered University of Washington Computer Science and Engineering Professor Oren Etzioni’s electronics price prediction startup Decide — which utilizes data mining and machine learning over electronics prices to help consumers determine when it’s best to buy the electronics gadgets on their wish lists: If only shopping for electronics were as easy as buying a car.   There was a time not so long ago that buying a car was one of the worst shopping experiences. As you drove off the dealer’s lot, you couldn’t […]

If you haven’t already, be sure to check out the Science Times in yesterday’s New York Times — devoted entirely to “the future of computing”: What’s next? If we had a supercomputer that could predict the future, we would tell you. Then again, if the past is any guide, the predictions would certainly be wrong. This special issue takes a many-faceted look at a set of technologies that are changing the world in more ways than could ever have been foreseen… In addition to Times‘ science and technology writers John Markoff and Steve Lohr, several computing researchers have authored short essays about recent innovations — and future potential — within computing(after […]