Data sets are growing rapidly. Yahoo, Google, and Amazon, work with data sets that consist of billions of items. The size and scale of data, which can be overwhelming today, will only increase as the Internet of Things matures. Data sets are also increasingly complex.  It is becoming more important to increase the pool of qualified scientists and engineers who can find the value from the large amount of big data. The National Academies released a report on training students to extract value from big data based on a Committee on Applied and Theoretical Statistics (CATS) workshop that occurred in April 2014. From the report: Training students to be capable in exploiting big data requires experience […]

The following is a guest post by Margo Seltzer, Herchel Smith Professor of Computer Science at Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Science. Her collaborators were Regina Herzlinger of Harvard Business School and Kevin Schulman of Duke University School of Medicine.  A computer scientist, doctor, and business professor all walked into a MOOC… Well, not exactly, but it is not far off from the HarvardX MOOC on healthcare innovation organized by Regina Herzlinger of Harvard Business School and featuring domain experts such as Dr. Kevin Schulman of Duke and me. Called “Innovating in Healthcare,” our goal was to engage participants in “evaluating opportunities and the elements of viable business models for […]

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) launched their Global City Teams Challenge with a great deal of energy and enthusiasm last month.  The workshop ended with more than a dozen presentations by potential Global City Team Challenge teams and provided an opportunity for interested parties to discuss Internet-of-Things deployments in a smart city environment. From the workshop report: The US Ignite website now contains materials related to 20+ potential Global City Teams projects or Action Clusters. If you would like to learn more about one of the listed projects or if you are interested in becoming associated with one of the projects, please email sokwoo.rhee@nist.gov and william.maguire@us-ignite.org. If you […]

The National Institute of Health (NIH) has announced an initial investment of nearly $32 million for NIH’s Big Data to Knowledge (BD2K) initiative which is projected to have a total investment of nearly $656 million through 2020. The BD2K initiative, launched in 2013, is a trans-NIH program that will develop new strategies to analyze and leverage the explosion of increasingly complex biomedical data sets, referred to as Big Data. Currently, biomedical data generation is exceeding researchers’ ability to capitalize on all the available data. The BD2K awards will support the development of new approaches, software, tools, and training programs to improve access to these data and the ability to make new […]

On September 10-11, the CCC co-hosted a visioning workshop focused on technologies that will allow older adults and people with disabilities to “age in place,” remain in their homes longer, reduce health care costs and enhance quality of life. CCC partnered with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to organize the “Trans-NIH/Interagency Workshop on the Use and Development of Assistive Technology for the Aging Population and People with Chronic Disabilities.” Held on the NIH campus in Bethesda, MD, the engaging workshop brought together a diverse set of experts – computer science researchers, medical practitioners, and government officials from numerous agencies (NIH, NSF, NIDRR, HUD, VA, FDA, CMS), to chart a course […]

In 2009, President Obama issued a Memorandum on Transparency and Open Government.  That memorandum has been followed by additional memorandums and Executive Orders resulting in the Open Government Initiative.  As a result of this initiative, governments (both federal and local) are releasing data feeds, which have enabled the creation and use of new applications, from real-time accurate traffic information to localized crime reporting. While the Initiative is presented as “an unqualified good” there are some questions about the impact on citizens.  As such, the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology and Microsoft have issued an RFP to further explore the technical, legal, and regulatory implications of Open Data.  From the solicitation: The […]