Are you working on a really exciting research project? Do you have a cool finding? Well, how about making a short video describing it — and getting paid in the process? Following up on our successful Computing Research Highlights of the Week, the CCC is announcing today a call for short videos describing exciting research and results in computer science: Many undergraduates don’t have a clear sense of what computer science research is all about. A common misconception is that it must be all about writing really big and complicated programs. The CCC would like to have a collection of short videos that provide undergraduates with some concrete examples of […]

The following is a special contribution to this blog by Deborah Estrin, Professor of Computer Science and Founding Director of the NSF-funded Center for Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS) at UCLA, and Ida Sim, Associate Professor and Director of the Center for Clinical and Translational Informatics (CCTI) at UCSF.  Estrin and Sim co-organized an Open mHealth Summit April 14-15 in Washington, DC. Mobile health (mHealth) has the potential to transform the nature and reach of health care activities; however an increasing concern is that proliferating independent mHealth apps are emerging highly siloed with limited data sharing and limited interoperability. Such a stovepipe approach threatens to fundamentally limit the power and potential […]

The Interagency Multiscale Modeling and Analysis Group (IMAG) — comprising program staff from NIH, NSF, DoE, DoD, NASA, USDA, and the VA — announced earlier this month a new interagency funding opportunity to support the development of multiscale models to accelerate biological, biomedical, behavioral, environmental, and clinical research.  From the official program announcement: Multiscale models can be designed to integrate diverse data, create testable hypotheses leading to new investigational studies, identify and share gaps in knowledge, uncover biological mechanisms, or make predictions about clinical outcome or intervention effects.  These models can draw on a variety of data sources including relevant physical, environmental, clinical and population data. Ultimately multiscale models and […]

The following is a special contribution to this blog by Ashok Goel, Associate Professor of Computer and Cognitive Science in the School of Interactive Computing and Director of the Digital Intelligence Laboratory at Georgia Tech. Ashok attended the AAAI Spring Symposium on AI and Sustainable Design in Palo Alto, CA, last month. Computational sustainability is becoming big in artificial intelligence (AI) research. For the first time ever, this year AAAI is organizing a special track on computational sustainability as part of its annual National Conference on AI. In addition, this year AAAI held a spring symposium on AI and sustainable design, organized by Doug Fisher (Vanderbilt Univerity) and Mary Lou Maher (University of Maryland […]

We’ve blogged about exciting computing innovations to improve transportation before — and there’s word this week about related work being pursued by researchers at IBM.  In collaboration with California highway officials and colleagues at the University of California-Berkeley, the researchers are pioneering predictive models of traffic patterns, derived from location information of individuals’ smart phones.  A key goal is to predict traffic delays with high precision before they develop based on historical data, as opposed to displaying current traffic information in near-real time.  While the IBM/Caltrans/Berkeley effort has thus far focused on smartphone users and traffic in Northern California, the researchers believe the approach is broadly extensible. The researchers will leverage […]

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 […]