The Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) Office of National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) — which in fall 2009 launched the Strategic Health IT Advanced Research Projects (SHARP) Program, providing funding to four teams pursuing research to generate new knowledge and innovations enabling “the meaningful use of health IT and a high-performing, adaptive, nationwide health care system” — is out with an interesting video (after the jump) describing what advances in computing mean for the healthcare system of the future. The video, accompanied by a new web portal, HealthIT.gov, touches on some of the themes captured by the Computing Community Consortium’s (CCC) October 2009 workshop on discovery […]

We all identify cities by certain attributes, such as building architecture, street signage, even the lamp posts and parking meters dotting the sidewalks. Now there’s a neat study by computer graphics researchers at Carnegie Mellon University — presented at SIGGRAPH 2012 earlier this month — that develops novel computational techniques to analyze imagery in Google Street View and identify what gives a city its character (more following the link):

New Scientist published a great story last week describing the history and evolution of the simplex algorithm — complete with a table capturing “2000 years of algorithms”: Its services are called upon thousands of times a second to ensure the world’s business runs smoothly — but are its mathematics as dependable as we thought?   YOU MIGHT not have heard of the algorithm that runs the world. Few people have, though it can determine much that goes on in our day-to-day lives: the food we have to eat, our schedule at work, when the train will come to take us there. Somewhere, in some server basement right now, it is probably working on […]

New York Times‘ tech writer John Markoff has penned a feature in today’s newspaper describing recent advances in robotics and automation, what they mean for the future of manufacturing and distribution, and the overall impact on the nation’s economy. The news is mixed, according to Markoff — but the article is worth a read. Some telling snippets: The Obama administration says this technological shift presents a historic opportunity for the nation to stay competitive. “The only way we are going to maintain manufacturing in the U.S. is if we have higher productivity,” said Tom Kalil, deputy director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.   Government officials and industry executives […]

The following is a special contribution to this blog by Will Barkis, Gigabit Developer Evangelist at Mozilla Foundation. As the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) noted back in June, Mozilla and the National Science Foundation (NSF) have teamed up to run an app development challenge to build killer apps on ultra high speed, deeply programmable networks. In particular, this challenge is seeking apps and services that are impossible on today’s networks. The first phase, running through next Thursday, Aug. 23rd, is focused on ideation — and includes $15,000 in prizes for the best ideas. Imagine what you could do in a world where bandwidth, computing capacity, and access to large data sets are unlimited. Imagine if physical […]

University of Southern California computer scientist and neuroscientist Maja Matarić is the subject of an interview appearing in today’s Nature. On the eve of the release of a new film, Robot and Frank, winner of the annual Sundance Film Festival, Matarić talks about the film and its coverage of assistive robotics — including recent advances for people with disabilities, children with autism, and the elderly. From the Nature piece (following the link):