The National Coordination Office (NCO) for the Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) Program — the Federal program that provides a framework and mechanisms for coordination among 15 Federal agencies collectively investing over $4 billion annually in networking and information technology research and development — has announced plans to hold the third in a series of workshops to bring together experts from academia and industry to help “create and implement a plan to facilitate research, development, experimentation, and testing by researchers to explore innovative spectrum-sharing technologies, including those that are secure and resilient.” The workshop will take place on July 24, 2012, in Boulder, Colorado. According to the announcement (following the […]

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has issued a new solicitation for its 2013 Director’s Transformative Research Awards, which will support “exceptionally innovative, original, and/or unconventional research with the potential to create new scientific paradigms, establish largely new and improved clinical approaches, or develop transformative technologies.” Unlike many other NIH R01 competitions, “little or no preliminary data [are] expected.” The Transformative Research Awards are funded through NIH’s Common Fund, which includes among its broad themes “computational and informatics challenges.” According to the solicitation (following the link; emphasis added):

The National Academies’ Computer Science and Telecommunications Board (CSTB) released this morning a new report — Computing Research for Sustainability — laying out an overall framework for computing research for sustainability, including recommendations for long-term research objectives and directions. The report, which was prepared by the CSTB’s Committee on Computing Research for Environmental and Societal Sustainability, describes how “innovation in computing will be essential to finding real-world solutions to sustainability challenges like electricity production and delivery, global food production, and climate change.” As UCLA computer science professor and committee chair Deborah Estrin noted as part of today’s announcement, “These problems are as complex as they are important; we need to engage deeply across disciplines to […]

National Institutes of Health (NIH) director Francis S. Collins has penned a guest forum in the July issue of Scientific American magazine. In it, he describes the promise of mobile health apps, noting that mobile device have the potential to become powerful medical tools, and calling attention to some of the myriad interdisciplinary research opportunities in this space: As a volunteer in a trial of mobile health technology, I can attest that it’s incredibly cool to pick up your iPhone, fire up an application to monitor your heart rate and rhythm, and then beam your ECG reading to a cardiologist halfway around the globe. As a physician-scientist, I also know that cool […]

“How is the general population of researchers and institutions to meet [the needs of] ‘Big Data’?” That was the question posed last week by Ian Foster, director of the Computation Institute at Argonne National Laboratory, before a packed auditorium at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) just outside Washington, DC. Foster was delivering one of the keynotes at NIST’s BIG DATA Workshop, a two-event that assembled leading experts from academia, industry, and government to explore key topics in support of the Federal government’s recently-announced $200 million Big Data R&D Initiative. Foster’s answer? (Follow the link to find out!)

A nice article on The New York Times‘s Bits Blog yesterday, about Carnegie Mellon University computer scientist Luis von Ahn and his Duolingo experiment: Language does not come naturally to machines. Unlike humans, computers cannot easily distinguish between, say, a river bank and a savings bank. Satire and jokes? Algorithms have great trouble with that. Irony? Wordplay? Cultural context? Forget it.   That human edge in decoding what things mean is what a computer scientist turned entrepreneur, Luis von Ahn, is betting on. His start-up, Duolingo, which opened to the public on Tuesday, proposes to put armies of language learners to work translating text on the Web [more following the […]