GNS Healthcare, a healthcare analytics company and Aetna, an American managed health care organization, are collaborating to make use of GNS’ supercomputer “REFS” (Reverse Engineering and Forward Simulation). By using predictive analytics with Aetna claims and other health information, the REFS platform will create data models to help the early identification of metabolic syndrome, which increases the risk of heart disease, stroke and diabetes. To see how REFS works with data and creating models, watch the video below: Read more about the collaboration from the GNS Healthcare press release below:

As we’ve previously blogged, Mozilla and the National Science Foundation (NSF) have teamed up for a challenge, called “Mozilla Ignite“, which focuses on the development of apps for faster, smarter internet of the future. Apps were designed to address needs in advanced manufacturing, education and workforce technologies, emergency preparedness and public safety, healthcare technologies and clean energy and transportation. The brainstorming round completed on August 23rd which brought in over 300 ideas from the community. Mozilla announced a total of eight winners, with one grand prize award. The grand prize winner from the brainstorming round went to Jeremy Cooperstock, director of the Shared Reality Lab at McGill University in Canada. Here […]

Today, the National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded $50 million for research projects designed to help build a secure cyber society and protect the US infrastructure. The awards come from the Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace Program (SaTC), which “builds on [NSF’s] long-term support for a wide range of cutting edge interdisciplinary research and education activities to secure critical infrastructure that is vulnerable to a wide range of threats that challenge its security.” The funded projects include two frontier awards — The first award, titled “Beyond Technical Security: Developing an Empirical Basis for Socio-Economic Perspectives“, is a multi-institution collaboration between Stefan Savage, University of California, San Diego, Vern Paxson, International Computer Science […]

A couple weeks ago, we featured the Institute of Medicine’s (IOM) release of a new landmark study titled Best Care at Lower Cost: The Path to Continuously Learning Health Care in America. One of the recommendations in the report is “to accelerate integration of the best clinical knowledge into care decisions.” IBM’s Watson, the supercomputing system that topped the world’s best human players at Jeopardy! last spring, is one example of leveraging advances in computer science to accelerate knowledge into healthcare decisions. As we’ve noted here previously, not only can Watson operate at the speed of 80 teraflops, but it can also over time learn which algorithms to run in which situations. The obvious example of […]

Nearly a year ago, tech writer John Markoff published a story in The New York Times about Open Source Indicators (OSI), a new program by the Federal government’s Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) seeking to automatically collect publicly available data, including Web search queries, blog entries, Internet traffic flows, financial market indicators, traffic webcams, changes in Wikipedia entries, etc., to understand patterns of human communication, consumption, and movement. According to Markoff: It is intended to be an entirely automated system, a “data eye in the sky” without human intervention, according to the program proposal. The research would not be limited to political and economic events, but would also explore the ability to predict pandemics and other types […]

Network World is out with a list of the 25 “coolest” computer networking research projects: University labs, fueled with millions of dollars in funding and some of the biggest brains around, are bursting with new research into computer and networking technologies. Wireless networks, computer security and a general focus on shrinking things and making them faster are among the hottest areas, with some advances already making their way into the market. Among the projects highlighted (following the link):