The following is a special contribution to this blog by Suchi Saria, a 2011 Computing Innovation Fellow who recently joined the faculty of Johns Hopkins University in computer science as well as health policy and management. Suchi co-led the organization of the second annual symposium on Meaningful Use of Complex Medical Data (MUCMD) in Los Angeles, CA, with Randall Wetzel, professor of anesthesiology at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. Our growing health care need is one of the largest looming crises of our time. In the United States, per capita spending in health care constitutes the highest in the world and almost twice that of the country ranked second. However, our […]

The following is a special contribution to this blog by Louiqa Raschid, a professor in the School of Business, Institute for Advanced Computer Studies, Department of Computer Science, and Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology at the University of Maryland, and H.V. Jagadish, Bernard A. Galler Collegiate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Michigan. Louiqa and Jag co-organized a workshop on next-generational financial cyberinfrastructure on July 18-19. Earlier this month, experts in computer science as well as finance gathered outside Washington, DC, to consider the need for a new financial cyberinfrastructure, and to elucidate the computing research challenges that are arising in this increasingly interdisciplinary space. Participants were drawn […]

The following is a special contribution to this blog by Carlos Guestrin, who will be joining the faculty of the University of Washington computer science and engineering department this fall. Carlos led the organization of the First GraphLab Workshop on Large-scale Machine Learning in San Francisco, CA. The scale and complexity of data on the web continues to grow at a tremendous rate. A recent New York Times article compared Big Data to an economic asset for companies, like currency and gold. But, in order to extract value from 6 billion Flickr images, 900 million Facebook users, 24 million Wikipedia articles, or the 72 hours of video uploaded to YouTube per minute, we need […]

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 following is a special contribution to this blog from Robin Murphy, Raytheon Professor of Computer Science and Engineering and director of the Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue at Texas A&M University. Back in April, Robin co-organized a visioning workshop about the role of computing in disaster management (including preparedness, prevention, response, and recovery). Here Robin summarizes the workshop, as well as the final report — Computing for Disasters: A Report from the Community Workshop — that the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is releasing today. What would it take to reach a point when the unimaginable could be predicted, handled, and coordinated so that it no longer constituted an emergency? What […]

“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!)