“How do you get people to buy more? That’s the $1 million question — literally.” RichRelevance and Overstock.com have partnered to offer the first-ever RecLab Prize on Overstock.com — up to $1 million in cash to the person or team capable of building the most powerful online product recommendation engine: The Prize provides a cash award totaling up to $1 million to the researcher or research team who can achieve a measurable lift over existing product recommendations in a wide variety of shopping contexts on Overstock.com. The RecLab Prize rewards the highest performing individual or team based on the results they are able to deliver within a defined judging period (up […]

A number of agencies within the NIH have come together to announce a one-day meeting on “Crowdsourcing: The Art and Science of Open Innovation,” to be held on the NIH grounds in Bethesda, MD, July 18, 2011.  The goal of the meeting is to lay the foundation for running successful challenges in biomedical and health research. Specifically, the meeting will: explore new ways to incentivize innovation in biomedical research with the prize authority recently given to all Federal agencies by Congress. The meeting will focus on the key aspects of this new approach that include: how to identify problems that can be solved through open innovation; how to communicate a scientific […]

The Computing Community Consortium is announcing today a Challenges and Visions Track at the First International Workshop on Managing Interoperability and compleXity in Health Systems (MIX-HS’11), to be held in Glasgow, Scotland, Oct. 28, 2011. MIX-HS’11 will be collocated with the 20th ACM Conference on Information Knowledge and Management. This special MIX-HS’11 track is the latest in a series of “research visions” sessions the CCC is sponsoring at computing research meetings — hoping to provide venues for sharing and discussing forward-looking, visionary ideas for the field, without the constraints of the typical reviewing process. In conjunction with our colleagues at the Mayo Clinic Rochester who are leading the organizing committee — […]

The Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) has announced a new funding opportunity in “transformational computing for aerospace science and engineering” — and particularly high-risk/high-payoff multidisciplinary approaches that may transform computing in the aerospace community. Awards are expected to span up to five years, with an annual investment of $1.5 million. The deadline for receipt of proposals is June 10, 2011. The wide-ranging and highly successful United States Air Force [AF] basic research program that exists today was borne out of the need to address a long standing shortfall in military basic research. While numerous advances have been made over the years, there are still many complex problems confronting the AF in […]

The National Library of Medicine has announced a software development challenge, seeking innovative software applications that use the library’s vast and free biomedical data. The goal is to further the agency’s “mission of supporting the dissemination and exchange of biomedical information to foster scientific discovery, enhance clinical care, and improve public health.” Entries are due by August 31, 2011 — and winners will be recognized at an awards ceremony at NLM in early November. The National Library of Medicine (NLM), part of the National Institutes of Health, invites people to show off their apps. NLM is challenging people to create innovative software applications that use the Library’s vast collection of […]

With support from the U.S. Department of Energy and U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the Trustworthy Cyber Infrastructure for the Power Grid (TCIPG) Center — a multi-university collaboration addressing the challenge of how to protect the nation’s power grid by significantly improving the way the power grid infrastructure is built — has announced the Cyber Security for Smart Energy Systems Summer School. Practitioners, researchers, and graduate students are invited to attend and explore the nexus between electrical energy systems and cyber security. Power industry practitioners, researchers, and graduate students are invited to participate in the 2011 TCIPG Summer School on Cyber Security for Smart Energy Systems. The Summer School will be held […]