The U.S. Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has awarded $38.5 million to 33 research and development (R&D) projects aimed at advancing broadband communications technologies for first responders. The multiyear grants are intended to help modernize public safety communications and operations by supporting the migration of data, video and voice communications from mobile radio to a nationwide public safety broadband network, as well as accelerating critical technologies related to indoor location tracking and public safety analytics. NIST reviewed 162 proposals from a diverse pool of national and international applicants across industry, academia and public safety organizations. The 33 selected projects span five key technology areas that have […]

The National Institute of Health (NIH), under the Big Data to Knowledge (BD2K) program, will be launching a Data Commons Pilot Phase to test ways to store, access, and share FAIR biomedical data and associated tools in the cloud. A data commons is a way to share and provide access to digital objects, like the data generated during biomedical research, or the software and other tools needed to use the data. A commons would help NIH extract more value from the digital products of biomedical research by making them available to more researchers. Using a cloud-based data commons model will empower researchers to find and interact with data directly in the […]

The AI Now Initiative is hosting a symposium on July 10th, 2017 at the MIT Media Lab to “address the biggest challenges we face as AI moves further into our everyday lives.” Leaders from industry, academia, civil society, and the government will share ideas for technical design, research and policy directions. See the full agenda here. Panel topics include: Bias Traps in AI A panel discussing how we understand bias in AI systems, highlighting the latest research insights and why issues of bias matter in concrete ways to real people. Governance Gaps Under Trump Trump is in power and Brexit is official. How has this changed the policy landscape for […]

As we start to embed sensing, computing, and communication into previously “dumb” infrastructure, there are clear benefits but it also creates new and challenging threats to safety, security, and privacy. How we address these threats is critical because, with cyber-physical systems, security vulnerabilities can translate directly to public safety hazards. Recently, the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) in collaboration with the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department Heads Association (ECEDHA) released white papers describing a collective research agenda for intelligent infrastructure. We will be blogging about each paper over the next few weeks. Today, we highlight the Safety and Security for Intelligent Infrastructure white paper. These threats occur in multiple forms (from information leakage to petty cybercrime to cyberwar) […]

The next WATCH talk, called Confidentiality à la Carte with Cipherbase is Thursday, June 22th, from 12 PM-1 PM ET. The presenter is Donald Kossmann, who is the director of the Microsoft Research Lab in Redmond. He joined Microsoft in 2014. Before that, he was a professor in the Systems Group of the Department of Computer Science at ETH Zurich (Switzerland). He is the Chair of ACM SIGMOD and an ACM Fellow. He is a co-founder of four start-ups in the areas of Web data management and cloud computing. Abstract: Organizations move data and workloads to the cloud because the cloud is cheaper, more agile, and more secure. Unfortunately, the cloud […]

Did you know that driverless cars communicate real-time location and other data to cloud aggregators like Google? This intelligent infrastructure monitoring compromises the privacy of drivers who continuously share their locations. Without a framework for protecting the privacy of the driver’s data, drivers will be very conservative about sharing their data. This data, however, is a necessity for adding the intelligence to intelligent infrastructure. Recently, the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) in collaboration with the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department Heads Association (ECEDHA) released white papers describing a collective research agenda for intelligent infrastructure. Today, we highlight a new paper that was just released called the Privacy in Information-Rich Intelligent Infrastructure paper. We will be blogging about […]