In a post on the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) Blog today, Deputy Director for Policy Tom Kalil noted the Administration’s keen interest in Big Data — and singled out the CCC’s recent white papers on data analytics: …Researchers in a growing number of fields are generating extremely large data sets, commonly referred to as “Big Data.” For example, the size of DNA sequencing databases is increasing by a factor of 10 every 18 months!  Researchers need better tools to help them store, index, search, visualize, and analyze these data, allowing them to discover new patterns and connections.   Increases in the ability to make predictions and […]

Imagine you’re at the CDC, and you’re trying to predict and respond to this year’s flu season in real-time. You could either contact millions of Americans — or let them contact you via Twitter. In an exciting paper titled “A Model for Mining Public Health Topics from Twitter” posted this week, Johns Hopkins University Assistant Professor Mark Dredze and second-year graduate student Michael Paul demonstrate a way to affordably gather real-time data about our health issues. Not only did the pair’s data support similar efforts, like Google’s Flu Tracker, it also generated new knowledge, according to the BBC: It provided an insight into how Twitter users viewed a range of illnesses […]

Search is a hard problem in computing, but it’s a critical problem in real life, as friends of computer scientist Jim Gray found out when he vanished at sea. In July’s issue of the Communications of the ACM, Gray’s friends describe the story of their technical challenges and lessons learned. Gray was famous for many things, including his determination to work with practitioners to transform the practical challenges they faced into scientific questions that could be formalized and addressed by the research community. As the search for Tenacious wound down, a number of us felt that even though the effort was not successful on its own terms, it offered a […]

Crowds are common at rock concerts, basketball games, and scientific research proposals. Wait — what? In The New York Times this week, there’s an interesting story about scientists looking for funding in creative ways: As research budgets tighten at universities and federal financing agencies, a new crop of Web-savvy scientists is hoping the wisdom — and generosity — of the crowds will come to the rescue. While nonprofit science organizations and medical research centers commonly seek donations from the public, Dr. [Jennifer] Calkins, an adjunct professor of biology at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., and Dr. [Jennifer] Gee may have been the first professional scientists to use a generic […]

Magnetic resonance imaging is an attractive tool for detecting breast cancer, but its slow speed and poor resolution limit its viability. With hardware and software improvements, those problems are fixable: on the hardware end, multiple coils arranged in an array produce more data with less noise. Combined with an interpolation algorithm, that large amount of data can be rapidly processed to better serve patients: To create sharp images quickly, Kyung Sung, a researcher working with [Brian Hargreaves, principal investigator and assistant professor of radiology at Stanford], has developed a process that does more with less information. A conventional breast MRI scan takes up to an hour because of the large amount […]

As thousands of firefighters battle huge wildfires in the Southwestern U.S this week, some are using a new tool in their kit: a computerized model that calculates the fire risk in real time — drawing on data about the fire’s behavior, danger, moisture over the past several decades, and terrain topology — to swiftly produce a priority map for where firefighters are most needed. Severe fire seasons of the past decade in the western United States have spurred many government agencies to manage lands to reduce fire intensity and severity to ultimately protect human life and property.   However, seven decades of fire exclusion policies have resulted in the dense forest […]