(This post has been updated; please scroll down for the latest.) Nearly 300 researchers, entrepreneurs, infrastructure providers, city managers, and others from around the country are gathered in Kansas City, MO, this week for the GENI Engineering Conference (GEC) — the twelfth in a series of conferences since the GENI Project was first funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) in 2007 to take a clean-slate approach and create a virtual laboratory for exploring future internets “at scale.” And for the first time, a key focus of the GEC is US Ignite, a new initiative by NSF and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) to spark the development of gigabit applications and services; […]

That’s the question being posed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which recently announced the DARPA Shredder Challenge — a competition for computer scientists and puzzle enthusiasts alike to piece together a series of shredded documents. The goal is “to identify and assess potential capabilities that could be used by our warfighters operating in war zones, but might also create vulnerabilities to sensitive information that is protected through our own shredding practices throughout the U.S. national security community.” DARPA will award one cash prize of up to $50,000. As Dan Kauffman, Director of DARPA’s Information Innovation Office (I2O), noted in announcing the Challenge: “The ability to reconstruct shredded documents will potentially yield information […]

Back in June, the Administration announced a $500 million Advanced Manufacturing Partnership (AMP) to stimulate the development of new technologies to spur high-tech manufacturing. A key focus was a $70 million commitment to research in next-generation robotics. But there’s another component of the AMP that also warrants some of our attention: called the Materials Genome Initiative (MGI), it’s a multi-agency effort “to double the speed with which we discover, develop, and manufacture new materials.” And as the Administration noted in June, the MGI seeks to “fund computational tools, software, new methods for material characterization, and the development of open standards and databases that will make the process of discovery and development of advanced materials […]

Earlier this month at an event in Washington, DC, Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner Margaret Hamburg, Ph.D., released a blueprint — titled “Driving Biomedical Innovation: Initiatives for Improving Products for Patients” — for spurring biomedical innovation and improving human health. Stemming from “a review of FDA’s current policies and practices, as well as months of meetings with major stakeholders,” the report “addresses concerns about the sustainability of the medical product development pipeline, which is slowing down despite record investments in research and development.” And among the major actions the blueprint focuses on implementing is the idea of harnessing the potential of data mining and machine learning while protecting patient privacy. […]

Before a packed room of leading government officials, technologists, and journalists in downtown Washington this morning, U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano stressed the need for a new public-private partnership framework that enables innovation and workforce development in cybersecurity in order to adequately protect our nation’s interests from cyber attacks. The event — Cybersecurity Breakfast: Protecting Our Nation’s Assets — was sponsored in part by Washington Post Live, the live journalism arm of The Washington Post Co., and held at the newspaper company’s headquarters. Napolitano described the cybersecurity challenge in her opening remarks: The risks to national and economic security from cyberspace affect us all. So we begin by saying that […]

Sometime on Halloween — yes, Halloween — the world’s population is projected to hit 7 billion. In anticipation of the numerical milestone, msnbc.com has published an article this week calling on leading experts in many different disciplines to weigh in on the challenges caused by the burgeoning world population, noting: How we respond now will determine whether we have a healthy, sustainable and prosperous future or one that is marked by inequalities, environmental decline and economic setbacks… Among the experts consulted is Google’s Vice President for Research and Special Initiatives Alfred Spector, who noted access to information and education as one of the problems facing society: In the developed world technology has transformed […]