The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has issued a Request for Information (RFI), “seeking ideas and input from the public … on successful strategies and remaining challenges in the creation of health IT-enabled quality measure development and reporting.” Comments are due by Aug. 20th. Among the questions regarding quality measurement enabled by health IT being posed in the RFI are (following the link):

Following a talk at the Euroscience Open Forum earlier this month, Intel principal engineer and futurist Brian David Johnson sat down with ScienceNOW to discuss his forecasts about “the interaction between humans and computers.” Noting he’s focused on the year 2020, Johnson had the following to say as part of the Q&A: Q: You study the interaction between humans and computers. What do you foresee in the next 10, 15 years?   B.D.J.: Looking at the past, technology has been about command and control. In the future it will be about relationships. Our technologies will get to know us and we’ll become more tightly connected. That has an impact on what we […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) has issued a call for participation for an upcoming visioning workshop on spatial computing. Led by Shashi Shekhar (University of Minnesota), the workshop — to be held in Washington, DC, on Sept. 10-11, 2012 — seeks to develop and promote a unified agenda for spatial computing R&D across U.S. agencies, universities, and corporations. From the call for participation (following the link):

The following is a special contribution to this blog by Carlos Guestrin, who will be joining the faculty of the University of Washington computer science and engineering department this fall. Carlos led the organization of the First GraphLab Workshop on Large-scale Machine Learning in San Francisco, CA. The scale and complexity of data on the web continues to grow at a tremendous rate. A recent New York Times article compared Big Data to an economic asset for companies, like currency and gold. But, in order to extract value from 6 billion Flickr images, 900 million Facebook users, 24 million Wikipedia articles, or the 72 hours of video uploaded to YouTube per minute, we need […]

At a meeting of the National Science Board (NSB) yesterday, National Science Foundation (NSF) Assistant Director for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Farnam Jahanian announced a new Science Across Virtual Institutes (SAVI) project that brings together teams from the U.S. and Japan to pursue fundamental advances in information technology in support of effective disaster management. The new SAVI — to be called Global Research on Applying Information Technology to Support Effective Disaster Management (GRAIT-DM) — will foster a global research collaboration focused on (following the link):

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has joined forces with George Mason University to launch the Innovation House Study, seeking to foster “radical, novel” approaches to extract meaningful content from visual and geospatial data. Teams will qualify for up to $50,000 in funding, will meet daily in Arlington, Virginia, during an intense eight-week work period, and will have access to unclassified aerial and ground-level video, high-resolution LiDAR of urban and mountainous terrain, and unstructured amateur photos and videos. Emphasis will be placed on collaboration, not competition. According to the request for proposals: The DARPA Innovation House is a study into the feasibility of effective software design and development in a short-fuse, crucible-style living […]