Late last month, Children’s Hospital Boston announced the launch of the CLARITY Challenge — Children’s Leadership Award for the Reliable Interpretation and appropriate Transmission of Your genomic information — a “competition intended to advance standards for genomic analysis and interpretation and the reporting of clear, actionable results to clinicians and patients.” The winning research team will be announced in October and receive a $25,000 prize. According to the contest website: We are on the threshold of a revolution in patient care. With important insights emerging daily about the genetic basis of disease, and the cost of sequencing an individual’s genome plummeting from over $3 million to $5,000 in only the past decade, the […]

The following is a special contribution to this blog from Eric Horvitz, Distinguished Scientist at Microsoft Research and member of the CCC Council, and Peter Lee, Managing Director of Microsoft Research Redmond. On the occasion of the 20th anniversary of Microsoft Research last September, we organized a day of reflection at the Redmond lab where we asked participants to look back and then forward to the next 20 years of computer science, with the goal of providing advice to young scientists. Today we are making available an overview view of highlights from the day of reflection, and also videos from one-on-one interviews. Check out the overview piece after the jump…

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) Microsystems Technology Office (MTO) has announced a Proposers Day for a new program — Power Efficiency Revolution for Embedded Computing Technologies (PERFECT) — to introduce the research community to the PERFECT vision and goals, and to facilitate interaction and coordination among prospective PIs and technology developers. The Proposers Day will take place on February 15, 2012, in Arlington, VA. The PERFECT program seeks to “provide the technologies and techniques to overcome the power efficiency barriers that currently constrain embedded computing systems capabilities and limit the potential of future embedded systems.” Importantly, a key component of this is resiliency, an area for which a recent CCC visioning […]

The Institute of Medicine (IOM) and National Academy of Engineering (NAE) have partnered to launch the “Go Viral to Improve Health” Health Data Collegiate Challenge, designed to spur undergraduate and graduate students to create health-related apps. The contest is aimed at students pursuing degrees in health, engineering, and computer science. And the prize for the winning team is $10,000. According to the Challenge website (after the jump):

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is out this month with a broad agency announcement soliciting “innovation research proposals in support of the development of new software-based biometric modalities” that go beyond the current focus of passwords for identity validation: The current standard method for validating a user’s identity for authentication on an information system requires humans to do something that is inherently difficult: create, remember, and manage long, complex passwords. Moreover, as long as the session remains active, typical systems incorporate no mechanisms to verify that the user originally authenticated is the user still in control of the keyboard. Thus, unauthorized individuals may improperly obtain extended access to […]

The International Society for Technology in Education (ITSE), in partnership with the Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA) and the National Science Foundation (NSF), is out with an outstanding four-minute video — Computational Thinking: A Digital Age Skill for Everyone — providing an introduction to computational thinking. It’s part of the ITSE’s recent efforts to develop an operational definition for CT, generate booklets for teachers and leaders, and develop a toolkit for presentations or meetings with educators and parents. To describe computational thinking, the video highlights how advances in computing research are changing our everyday lives — from tracking and preventing crime to efficiently managing the global food supply, from detecting illnesses in rural […]