If you’re like most of us, you’ve already spent some time stuck in traffic today. As it turns out, on average, each of us spends 50 hours in congestion every year. Well, Stanford University computer scientist Balaji Prabhakar is experimenting with a possible solution — incentive-based approaches, from reward points to lottery cash prizes, that encourage a portion of rush-hour commuters to shift their commutes to the hour before or after peak travel times. The New York Times‘s John Markoff has an excellent piece describing Prabhakar’s work — including early trials on the Stanford campus, in Bangalore, and in Singapore — in today’s Science Times: London, Singapore, Stockholm and a few other cities around the world […]

From time to time, we feature on this Blog an exciting research result that’s been picked up the mainstream media. Here’s one that’s garnered some interest this week, having first appeared on The New York Times‘ Bits Blog: engineers at Twitter are presenting papers at the 6th International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM-12) in Dublin — as well as the co-located workshop on Social Media Visualization — attempting to scientifically characterize the real-time nature of the popular social media platform. Some highlights of their work on real-time tweets and search queries, according to the engineers (following the link):

The heads of the National Science Foundation (NSF) and Japan Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) issued a joint statement this afternoon affirming a commitment to foster multi-national, multi-disciplinary research collaborations on disaster response, particularly in light of the opportunities being enabled by ‘Big Data’: The catastrophic consequences of natural and human disasters have been demonstrated repeatedly in recent years, most notably in the Great East Japan earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster but also in the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, Hurricane Katrina, and regional droughts, floods and fires. These events clearly demonstrate the urgent need for basic research to advance fundamental knowledge and innovation for disaster prevention, mitigation and […]

The National Science Foundation (NSF) and Science magazine have announced the 10th International Science & Engineering Visualization Challenge. The annual competition aims to celebrate the grand tradition of visualizations, in the spirit of communicating science, engineering, and technology for education and journalistic purposes. There’s a category all about Video Games & Apps — and last year’s winner was Foldit, an entry by University of Washington computer scientists Zoran Popović and Seth Cooper. Judges appointed by NSF and Science will select winners in five categories: Photography, Illustrations, Posters & Graphics, Video Games & Apps, and Videos. The winning entries will appear in a special section of Science (with one entry chosen for the front cover) and be hosted at ScienceMag.org and NSF.gov. In […]

Last week, the UC Berkeley’s School of Information held a forum — called the DataEDGE Conference — seeking to explore the challenges and opportunities associated with the transition to a data-intensive economy. One of the speakers was danah boyd, Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research and an Assistant Professor at New York University, who discussed the implications of Big Data on privacy — and the role for researchers and technologists moving forward. The New York Times‘ Bits Blog has coverage of boyd’s talk: “Privacy is a source of tremendous tension and anxiety in Big Data,” says Danah Boyd, a senior researcher at Microsoft Research. Speaking last week at a conference on Big Data at the University of […]

A number of news outlets have begun covering Plan X, a new five-year, $110 million cyberwarfare research program that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) expects to launch this summer. According to The Washington Post, which broke the news earlier this week: The Pentagon is turning to the private sector, universities and even computer-game companies as part of an ambitious effort to develop technologies to improve its cyberwarfare capabilities, launch effective attacks and withstand the likely retaliation.   The previously unreported effort, which its authors have dubbed Plan X, marks a new phase in the nation’s fledgling military operations in cyberspace, which have focused more on protecting the Defense Department’s computer systems than on […]