(This post has been updated; please scroll down below for the latest.) The first round of awards for next-generation robotics R&D through the National Robotics Initiative (NRI) are being announced today, according to White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) deputy director for policy Tom Kalil: Today, four federal agencies announced $40 million in grants to university researchers across the country to advance the National Robotics Initiative, unveiled by President Obama at Carnegie Mellon University on June 24, 2011.   The initiative, led by the National Science Foundation, is also supported by NASA, the National Institutes of Health, and the United States Department of Agriculture.  These agencies have also issued a new joint […]

The National Science Foundation (NSF), together with the National Institutes of Health (NIH), NASA, and U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), yesterday issued a new solicitation for the National Robotics Initiative (NRI), seeking small (one or more investigators, funded at a rate of up to $250,000 in direct costs per year for up to five years) and large (multi-disciplinary teams, up to $1 million in direct costs per year for three to five years) proposals that support fundamental research enabling “the realization of co-robots acting in direct support of individuals and groups.” Up to $50 million in funds are available in the coming year. Small proposals are due Dec. 11th; large proposals by Jan. […]

Technology writer Steve Lohr had a great piece about the future of computing — and other fields — in The New York Times yesterday: TECHNOLOGY tends to cascade into the marketplace in waves. Think of personal computers in the 1980s, the Internet in the 1990s and smartphones in the last five years.   Computing may be on the cusp of another such wave. This one, many researchers and entrepreneurs say, will be based on smarter machines and software that will automate more tasks and help people make better decisions in business, science and government. And the technological building blocks, both hardware and software, are falling into place, stirring optimism [more following the link…]. […]

The President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) heard this morning from Susan L. Graham (UC Berkeley and the Computing Community Consortium), Peter Lee (Microsoft Research), and David E. Shaw (D.E. Shaw & Co.), co-chairs of a small PCAST working group assessing the status and direction of the nation’s Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) program. The objectives of the working group, which is producing a short update to the comprehensive report on the NITRD program that PCAST issued in December 2010 as required by law, are three-fold: to understand what has transpired in the nearly two years since the last report (both in terms of policy and technological advances), […]

Moments ago, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) of the National Academies released what promises to become a landmark study — Best Care at Lower Cost: The Path to Continuously Learning Health Care in America — comprehensively laying the foundation for a learning health care system that links personal and population data to researchers, practitioners, and patients, thereby “dramatically enhancing the knowledge base on effectiveness of interventions and providing real-time guidance for superior care in treating and preventing illness.” The report presents “a vision of what is possible if the nation applies the resources and tools at hand by marshaling science, information technology, incentives, and care culture to transform effectiveness and efficacy of care.” What’s most […]

We’ve blogged extensively in this space over the last few months about the promise of Big Data science and engineering, including stories describing how very large data sets coupled with predictive analytics capabilities are transforming the way we use e-readers or leverage medical records to drive advances in healthcare. Now here’s an interesting new angle — the world of sports. For all you tennis fans out there, IBM has launched a new analytics tool at this year’s US Open — SlamTracker — to help individuals better understand what’s happening on the courts in Flushing, NY. SlamTracker uses nearly 40 million data points from five years of Grand Slam tournaments to analyze and present each competitor’s performance styles and patterns […]