Earlier this afternoon, the National Science Foundation (NSF) held an informational webinar about its new multi-disciplinary Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace (SaTC) program. Replacing NSF’s Trustworthy Computing (TwC) program this year, SaTC expands cybersecurity research support within the Foundation beyond the Computer & Information Science & Engineering (CISE) Directorate for the first time, to include the directorates for Social, Behavioral, & Economic Sciences (SBE) and Mathematical and Physical Sciences (MPS) as well as the Office of Cyberinfrastructure (OCI). In the webinar, NSF officials highlighted the goals and driving principles underlying the SaTC solicitation and offered deep dives into each of three “perspectives.” They also noted that any proposer should clearly delineate his or her problem statement and specify the relevance of his or her proposed work to the […]

The Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) will host the CCC Council’s very own Fred Schneider at 1pm EST today as part of its 60th Anniversary Commemorative Seminar Series. In a talk titled “Cybersecurity: Technology and Policy,” Fred will describe his research supporting “the construction of concurrent and distributed systems for high-integrity and mission-critical settings with a focus on fault-tolerance and security.” More details, including a link to a live web feed of the talk, after the jump…

Earlier this month, the Department of Health and Human Services’ (DHHS) Center for Medicare & Medicaid Innovation — within the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) — officially rolled out its Health Care Innovation Challenge, with up to $1 billion in grant funding to those who “implement the most compelling new ideas to deliver better health, improved care, and lower costs to people enrolled in Medicare, Medicaid, and Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), particularly those with the highest health care needs.” The objectives of this new initiative are to: Engage a broad set of innovation partners to identify and test new care delivery and payment models that originate in the field […]

Two relevant challenges announced recently that are placing emphasis on prize-based innovation: DEBUT Challenge (for undergraduate students): The National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB) has announced a competition — called the Design by Biomedical Undergraduate Teams (DEBUT) Challenge — for undergraduate students to foster the design and development of innovative diagnostic and therapeutic devices and technologies that address unmet health and clinical needs. According to the DEBUT website (emphasis added): NIBIB’s mission is to improve health by leading the development and accelerating the application of biomedical technologies. The goals of the challenge are 1) to provide undergraduate students valuable experiences such as working in teams, identifying unmet clinical needs, and designing, […]

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) Information Innovation Office (I2O) announced last week its intention to issue, perhaps in December, a solicitation for Crowd Sourced Formal Verification (CSFV), with the goal of investigating “innovative approaches that automatically create games capable of transforming formal verification problems into compelling games for end users to play.” From the official notification: Currently, formal program verification is not widely practiced due to high costs and the fact that fundamental program verification problems resist automation. This is particularly an issue for the Department of Defense because formal verification, while a proven method for reducing defects in software, currently requires highly specialized talent and cannot be scaled to the […]

Among the 10 world-changing ideas we featured earlier today is the “forever health monitor,” i.e., the ability to exploit today’s technology to quickly, easily, and fairly inexpensively monitor our own vital signs in real time, so that we may pinpoint the first signs of trouble as they arise. It turns out one man — Internet pioneer and founding director of California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (CalIT2) Larry Smarr — has been doing exactly that for the past 10 years. And for all his personal health instrumentation efforts, Xconomy has named Larry its Xconomist of the Week: In the 10 years since he moved to San Diego to become founding director of the [University of California] system’s [CalIT2], […]