From The New York Times‘s Bits Blog: Rick Smolan, the photographer and impresario of media projects, has tackled all sorts of big subjects over the years, from countries (“A Day in the Life of Australia” in 1981) to drinking water (“Blue Planet Run” in 2007). He typically recruits about 100 photographers for each, and their work is crafted into classy coffee-table books of striking photographs and short essays.   But Mr. Smolan concedes that his current venture has been “by far the most challenging project we’ve done.”   Small wonder, given his target: Big Data.   Massive rivers of digital information are a snooze, visually. Yet that is the narrow, literal-minded […]

The New York Times’s John Markoff has penned another article on robotics today, this time featuring the efforts of Rodney Brooks and Rethink Robotics to engineer robots that work directly with humans in the workplace: If you grab the hand of a two-armed robot named Baxter, it will turn its head and a pair of cartoon eyes — displayed on a tablet-size computer-screen “face” — will peer at you with interest.   The sensation that Baxter conveys is not creepy, but benign, perhaps even disarmingly friendly. And that is intentional.   Baxter, the first product of Rethink Robotics, an ambitious start-up company in a revived manufacturing district here, is a significant bet that robots in the future […]

The Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research (OBSSR) within the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has issued a Request for Information (RFI) announcing its intent to establish a new Mobile Health Public-Private Partnership (mHealth PPP) that would “facilitate research and evidence collection to enable the appropriate use of wireless devices to improve health in both the domestic and global environment” through collaboration among government, academic, non-profit, philanthropic, and private sector organizations. In particular, the RFI seeks to identify organizations that could serve as managing partner and/or participants for the mHealth PPP. According to the RFI (following the link):

The National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Science Nation has featured the work of Mississippi State University computer scientist J. Edward Swan II today, describing how his efforts to improve depth perception are critical to future military and medical applications of augmented reality: Sports fans have come to expect some of the extras they see on their TV screen, such as the yellow lines that appear on a football field highlighting where the ball needs to go for a first down. Similarly, NASCAR fans can find their favorite driver in the pack because of those superimposed car numbers on the screen.   “Anyone who’s seen a football game has seen the virtual first-down line and it […]

Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee of MIT have posted an interesting entry to the Harvard Business Review Blog about big data and corporate management: Big data has the potential to revolutionize management. Simply put, because of big data, managers can measure, and hence know, radically more about their businesses, and directly translate that knowledge into improved decision making and performance. Of course, companies such as Google and Amazon are already doing this. After all, we expect companies that were born digital to accomplish things that business executives could only dream of a generation ago. But in fact the use of big data has the potential to transform traditional businesses as well.   […]

(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 […]