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.   […]

The National Science Foundation (NSF), together with the National Institutes of Health (NIH), NASA, and U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), yesterday issued a new solicitation for the National Robotics Initiative (NRI), seeking small (one or more investigators, funded at a rate of up to $250,000 in direct costs per year for up to five years) and large (multi-disciplinary teams, up to $1 million in direct costs per year for three to five years) proposals that support fundamental research enabling “the realization of co-robots acting in direct support of individuals and groups.” Up to $50 million in funds are available in the coming year. Small proposals are due Dec. 11th; large proposals by Jan. […]

With the start of the 2012-13 school year, the National Science Foundation (NSF) yesterday released the first issue of the second volume of CS Bits & Bytes, focusing on biomimetic robotics, relating optimal control to the 2012 Summer Olympics. The issue highlights the work of Emanuel Todorov’s Movement Control Laboratory at the University of Washington, includes links to related videos, and contains a culminating activity that asks students to define performance metrics for sports, helping them realize all that must go into optimal control and performance. CS Bits & Bytes is a biweekly newsletter developed to make computer science more accessible to educators and learners around the world. Each issue of CS […]

The President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) heard this morning from Susan L. Graham (UC Berkeley and the Computing Community Consortium), Peter Lee (Microsoft Research), and David E. Shaw (D.E. Shaw & Co.), co-chairs of a small PCAST working group assessing the status and direction of the nation’s Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) program. The objectives of the working group, which is producing a short update to the comprehensive report on the NITRD program that PCAST issued in December 2010 as required by law, are three-fold: to understand what has transpired in the nearly two years since the last report (both in terms of policy and technological advances), […]

Moments ago, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) of the National Academies released what promises to become a landmark study — Best Care at Lower Cost: The Path to Continuously Learning Health Care in America — comprehensively laying the foundation for a learning health care system that links personal and population data to researchers, practitioners, and patients, thereby “dramatically enhancing the knowledge base on effectiveness of interventions and providing real-time guidance for superior care in treating and preventing illness.” The report presents “a vision of what is possible if the nation applies the resources and tools at hand by marshaling science, information technology, incentives, and care culture to transform effectiveness and efficacy of care.” What’s most […]

The Bay Area Council Economic Institute (BACEI) is out with a new report that integrates data from multiple sources, including the biennial Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) numbers we featured here several months ago, and presents a revealing county-by-county portrait illustrating where within the U.S. high-tech jobs are found. And the result is quite striking: it’s not just in Silicon Valley, but rather in communities all across the country where there have recently been increases of more than 10 percent in high-tech employment. Here are some of the takeaways the BACEI highlighted in its report: