We’ve blogged about exciting computing innovations to improve transportation before — and there’s word this week about related work being pursued by researchers at IBM.  In collaboration with California highway officials and colleagues at the University of California-Berkeley, the researchers are pioneering predictive models of traffic patterns, derived from location information of individuals’ smart phones.  A key goal is to predict traffic delays with high precision before they develop based on historical data, as opposed to displaying current traffic information in near-real time.  While the IBM/Caltrans/Berkeley effort has thus far focused on smartphone users and traffic in Northern California, the researchers believe the approach is broadly extensible. The researchers will leverage […]

On the heels of a speech by President Obama last week touting a public-private partnership seeking to “help large fleets reduce diesel and gasoline use by incorporating electric vehicles, alternative fuels, and fuel-saving measures” including mobile applications, U.S. Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra yesterday described a variety of Federal research programs aimed at deploying new and innovative information and communications technologies throughout the transportation system.  In a blog entry on The White House website, Chopra and Peter Appel, Administrator of the Transportation Department’s Research and Innovative Technology Administration, wrote: The U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT), through the Research and Innovative Technology Administration’s Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) Research Program, in close partnership […]

Many of us have completed our share of March Madness brackets, competing in leagues or pools to see who can be best at predicting the outcome of the annual NCAA Tournament.  For the second year in a row, University of Toronto machine learning Ph.D. student Danny Tarlow has organized and run one such pool.  But what makes Tarlow’s pool unique — and noteworthy here — is that all entries are computer-generated, i.e., the entries are brackets completed by computer algorithms working off of historial data and without the use of any human judgment.  Tarlow calls it the March Madness Predictive Analytics Challenge, and the rules he’s defined tell the story: Your bracket must be […]

A number of news organizations reported last week on the announcement of a $3 million prize for predicting hospitalizations.  It’s just one in a series of open algorithm-creation contests startup company Kaggle is helping to run to help incentivize predictive analytics.  As The Wall Street Journal reported: Amid a larger effort to use medical data to improve health care, one company is trying something new:  offering $3 million in prize money for the algorithm that can best predict when people are likely to be sent to the hospital. The algorithm contest, the largest of its kind so far, is part of a trend toward using such prizes to help find the best answers […]

Nearly two dozen IT companies are announcing today a new nonprofit organization called the Open Networking Foundation (ONF), dedicated to promoting the development and use of Software-Defined Networking (SDN) technologies like OpenFlow. Deutsche Telekom, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Verizon, and Yahoo! are founding partners, and another 17 companies — including major equipment vendors, networking and virtualization software suppliers, and chip technology providers — are members. From the official press release: In the past two decades, enormous innovation has taken place on top of the Internet architecture. Email, e-commerce, search, social networks, cloud computing, and the web as we know it are all good examples. While networking technologies have also evolved in this time, the […]

The CCC-sponsored robotics initiative kicks off next week with the first of four workshops covering the impact, applications and emerging technologies of robotics. Robotics research and development have already transformed our lives in many ways: they perform nearly all the welding and painting on the cars we drive; they enable telerobotic surgery resulting in more reliable outcomes and faster recovery times; they perform millions of scientific experiments and observations in chemistry, biology and medical labs.  Increasingly robotics is also providing improved control and functionality in people’s daily lives: some new model cars can park themselves or provide advanced distance-keeping cruise control and collision warnings; millions of autonomous vacuum cleaners are […]