In the July Scientific American, Caltech electrical engineering and computer science professor Yaser S. Abu-Mostafa describes recent advances in machine learning: A couple of years ago the directors of a women’s clothing company asked me to help them develop better fashion recommendations for their clients. No one in their right mind would seek my personal advice in an area I know so little about — I am, after all, a male computer scientist — but they were not asking for my personal advice. They were asking for my machine-learning advice, and I obliged. Based purely on sales figures and client surveys, I was able to recommend to women whom I have never […]
Computing Community Consortium Blog
The goal of the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is to catalyze the computing research community to debate longer range, more audacious research challenges; to build consensus around research visions; to evolve the most promising visions toward clearly defined initiatives; and to work with the funding organizations to move challenges and visions toward funding initiatives. The purpose of this blog is to provide a more immediate, online mechanism for dissemination of visioning concepts and community discussion/debate about them.
“How to Teach Computers to Learn on Their Own”
June 27th, 2012 / in big science, research horizons, Research News / by Erwin GianchandaniFirst Person: Pattie Maes on the Future of HCI
June 26th, 2012 / in big science, research horizons, Research News / by Erwin GianchandaniOn the heels of Francis Collins’s Scientific American article about mobile health apps, Technology Review has an interesting interview with MIT Media Lab associate professor Pattie Maes about the future of human-computer interaction in light of recent advances in mobile technologies: What will smart phones be like five years from now? Phones may know not just where you are but that you are in a conversation, and who you are talking to, and they may make certain information and documents available based on what conversation you’re having. Or they may silence themselves, knowing that you’re in an interview [more following the link].
What if There Were No More Disasters?
June 25th, 2012 / in big science, CCC, research horizons, workshop reports / by Erwin GianchandaniThe 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 […]
NIH Director Describes “Real Promise of Mobile Health Apps”
June 24th, 2012 / in big science, policy, research horizons, resources / by Erwin GianchandaniNational 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 […]
NIST’s BIG DATA Workshop:
Too Much Data, Not Enough Solutions
June 21st, 2012 /
in big science, policy, research horizons, resources, workshop reports /
by
Erwin Gianchandani
“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!)
“Computer Scientist Banks on Human Superiority Over Machines”
June 20th, 2012 / in Research News, resources / by Erwin GianchandaniA 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 […]
