This is a guest post, written by David W. McDonald, Chair and Associate Professor in the Human Centered Design and Engineering Department at the University of Washington. Designing a good application is hard. Designing a good computer system is harder. Designing a good system that accounts for the vagaries of people, their motivations, and their flaws is even harder. Yet that is the challenge that designers of social computing systems must solve. The difficulties of designing social computing systems derive from both the complexity of the software and hardware configurations, and the fact that some participants in a social computing system will not behave with positive goals or intent. That […]

The following is a special contribution to this blog from Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Chair Gregory Hager (Johns Hopkins University). Imagine you have to change the IV on a writhing patient while wearing two layers of protective gear, the temperature is nearly 100 degrees, the humidity is 100 percent, and you’ve been in your suit for nearly an hour. That is the daily struggle for healthcare workers across Western Africa treating Ebola patients. Can we somehow use our technologies, either those existing today or envisioned for the near future, to change the course of this daily battle and, by doing so, have an impact that could potentially save the lives of […]

On November 6, 2014, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Biological Technologies Office (BTO) announced a new program with a simplified process for engaging with DARPA that will make it easier for businesses to attract up to $700k in seedling funding to pursue capabilities at the intersection of biology and technology. From Dr. Alicia Jackson, deputy director of DARPA’s BTO: DARPA’s Biological Technologies Office looks at biology as a technology, with a focus on harnessing living systems or integrating those systems with nonliving systems.  If you look at where we’re already invested, it’s in areas such as human-machine interfaces, synthetic biology, combatting infectious disease and optimizing human health. The ideas we’re seeking would continue that […]

On November 13, the National Science Foundation (NSF) will host it’s next Washington Area Trustworthy Computing Hour (WATCH) talk. The talk will be “The burden of authentication: What friction points reveal.” The speaker will be Dana Chisnell, from the Center for Civic Design. From the abstract: Everyone whines about dealing with passwords and authentication, but what is the real cost to individual users? In a study conducted with 23 people at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, we asked participants to tell us about every time they authenticated in a 24-hour period. From this, we learned that the friction of authentication goes beyond the specific act of authenticating, spilling over into tasks, productivity, and […]

The following is a guest blog post by CCC Council Member Shashi Shekhar, McKnight Distinguished University Professor Department of Computer Science College of Science and Engineering University of Minnesota. Cyber-Earth, a web-based geo-referenced representation of our changing planet, is a powerful tool for communication among citizens, policy makers, and scientists. In the last decade, billions have enjoyed Google Earth, which provides geo-imagery describing a recent state of the entire planet. It is a scalable tool to share geo-imagery (e.g., aftermath of Hurricane Katarina) with citizens and policy makers. It also allows citizens to contribute geo-spatial information to improve map quality and coverage as envisaged in the 1998 speech by Vice President Al Gore on […]

The National Science Foundation recently featured University of Missouri computer scientist Marjorie Skubic in a Science360 radio episode. Skubic is engineering high speed networks that can remotely monitor movement and vital signs. The goal is to help provide independent living for the elderly. In this photo at the Smart America Expo, Skubic is showing sensors that are placed under a mattress to monitor vital signs. As part of the Closed Loop Healthcare team at the Expo, Skubic worked to connect the technologies she’s created with those developed by other teams with similar health care goals. Marjorie Skubic was a recent participant at the CCC Aging in Place Workshop. Aging in Place was a trans-NIH/interagency […]