(This post has been updated; please scroll down for the latest.) Following on the heels of yesterday’s announcement of the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) new, interdisciplinary Smart Health and Wellbeing (SHB) program, we thought this would be an appropriate time to highlight a series of articles about health IT R&D in the September/October 2011 issue of IEEE Intelligent Systems. From the abstract: In light of such overwhelming interest from governments and academia in adopting and advancing IT for effective healthcare, there are great opportunities for researchers and practitioners alike to invest efforts in conducting innovative and high-impact healthcare IT research. This IEEE Intelligent Systems Trends and Controversies (T&C) Department hopes to raise awareness and highlight selected recent research that helps […]

The National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Directorates for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE), Engineering (ENG), and Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences (SBE) have joined forces to co-sponsor a new, interdisciplinary Smart Health and Wellbeing (SHB) program for FY 2012. The solicitation just out today broadens a program first implemented by CISE in spring 2011 — and is consistent with an outline in last winter’s President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) report on networking and information technology R&D as well as a prior Computing Community Consortium (CCC) health IT research roadmap: Through the Smart Health and Wellbeing (SHB) Program, NSF seeks to address fundamental technical and scientific issues that would support much needed transformation of healthcare from reactive and hospital-centered […]

For those who may have missed it, an article in last week’s Bloomberg Businessweek — under the heading “creating chips that learn and respond as they gain experience” — described recent and ongoing advances in AI, cognition, and human-computer interaction: In a windowless room deep inside IBM’s Almaden Research Center in San Jose, scientists are teaching a computer chip to learn from what it sees, much like a human.   The effort is paying off, if performance at Pong is any measure. When the chip, part of a project called SyNAPSE, first learned to play the classic videogame in March, it did poorly. Weeks later, the company reports, it was nearly unbeatable.   […]

At 11am EST today, key officials from the National Science Foundation (NSF), led by NSF Director Subra Suresh, will present a live webcast about the Foundation’s new Creative Research Awards for Transformative Interdisciplinary Ventures (CREATIV) — a “pilot grant mechanism under the Integrated NSF Support Promoting Interdisciplinary Research and Education (INSPIRE) initiative, to support bold interdisciplinary projects in all NSF-supported areas of science, engineering, and education research.” The goals of the CREATIV grant mechanism are to create new interdisciplinary opportunities that are not perceived to exist presently; attract unusually creative high-risk/high-reward interdisciplinary proposals; and provide substantial funding, not limited to the exploratory stage of the pursuit of novel ideas. Importantly, CREATIV […]

The Computing Community Consortium’s (CCC) latest Challenges & Visions track was held Nov. 3 at the 9th Annual IEEE Symposium on Safety, Security, and Rescue Robotics (SSRR) in Kyoto, Japan. The “outrageous visions for computing in rescue robotics” track was a success, expanding the awareness of computing for a less traditionally computational group — roboticists. (Previous tracks have been at conferences on spatial computing, databases, and operating systems.) SSRR is a single-track conference sponsored by the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society that attracts about 80 researchers and students from around the world in multiple disciplines: computer science, engineering, physics, and even medicine. The symposium focuses on stimulating meaningful conversations and demonstrations to […]

The following is a special contribution to this blog by Amy Apon, Chair of the Computer Science Division at Clemson University’s School of Computing. Apon attended the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) EarthCube Charette this week, and she recounts her experiences below. Earlier this week, the EarthCube community met at the first-ever EarthCube Charette in Washington, DC. EarthCube is a community process, with the goal of transforming the conduct of research by supporting the development of cyberinfrastructure that integrates data and information for knowledge management across the geosciences. EarthCube is supported jointly by the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Office of Cyberinfrastructure (OCI) and the Directorate for Geosciences (GEO). Already the EarthCube social networking website […]