If you’re like most of us, you’ve already spent some time stuck in traffic today. As it turns out, on average, each of us spends 50 hours in congestion every year. Well, Stanford University computer scientist Balaji Prabhakar is experimenting with a possible solution — incentive-based approaches, from reward points to lottery cash prizes, that encourage a portion of rush-hour commuters to shift their commutes to the hour before or after peak travel times. The New York Times‘s John Markoff has an excellent piece describing Prabhakar’s work — including early trials on the Stanford campus, in Bangalore, and in Singapore — in today’s Science Times: London, Singapore, Stockholm and a few other cities around the world […]
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.
“Incentives for Drivers Who Avoid Traffic Jams”
June 12th, 2012 / in Research News / by Erwin GianchandaniOSTP Holding Event on Public Sector Prizes
June 11th, 2012 / in policy, resources, videos, workshop reports / by Erwin GianchandaniThe White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) — together with the Case Foundation and the Joyce Foundation — is hosting an event Tuesday on Public Sector Prizes, seeking to further understand the role of incentive prizes and challenges in the public sector — and to catalyze future initiatives in this space. A portion of the event will be streamed live via the web for those interested. According to an OSTP announcement (following the link):
NIH Seeking Advances in Spatial Uncertainty
June 11th, 2012 / in research horizons, resources / by Erwin GianchandaniThe National Institutes of Health (NIH) has issued a solicitation — Spatial Uncertainty: Data, Modeling, and Communication — for innovative research that identifies sources of spatial uncertainty in public health data, incorporates the inaccuracy into statistical methods, and develops novel tools to visualize the nature and consequences of the spatial uncertainty. The solicitation, which spans 7 NIH institutes, offers deadlines of February 5, June 5, and October 5 through summer 2014. According to the NIH (following the link):
“Twitter Knows When You Sleep, and More”
June 9th, 2012 / in Research News, resources / by Erwin GianchandaniFrom time to time, we feature on this Blog an exciting research result that’s been picked up the mainstream media. Here’s one that’s garnered some interest this week, having first appeared on The New York Times‘ Bits Blog: engineers at Twitter are presenting papers at the 6th International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM-12) in Dublin — as well as the co-located workshop on Social Media Visualization — attempting to scientifically characterize the real-time nature of the popular social media platform. Some highlights of their work on real-time tweets and search queries, according to the engineers (following the link):
U.S., Japan Collaboration on Big Data and Disaster Research
June 8th, 2012 / in big science, policy, research horizons, Research News, resources / by Erwin GianchandaniThe heads of the National Science Foundation (NSF) and Japan Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) issued a joint statement this afternoon affirming a commitment to foster multi-national, multi-disciplinary research collaborations on disaster response, particularly in light of the opportunities being enabled by ‘Big Data’: The catastrophic consequences of natural and human disasters have been demonstrated repeatedly in recent years, most notably in the Great East Japan earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster but also in the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, Hurricane Katrina, and regional droughts, floods and fires. These events clearly demonstrate the urgent need for basic research to advance fundamental knowledge and innovation for disaster prevention, mitigation and […]
NSF, Science Seeking Video Games, Apps for Visualization Challenge
June 8th, 2012 / in awards, Research News, resources, videos / by Erwin GianchandaniThe National Science Foundation (NSF) and Science magazine have announced the 10th International Science & Engineering Visualization Challenge. The annual competition aims to celebrate the grand tradition of visualizations, in the spirit of communicating science, engineering, and technology for education and journalistic purposes. There’s a category all about Video Games & Apps — and last year’s winner was Foldit, an entry by University of Washington computer scientists Zoran Popović and Seth Cooper. Judges appointed by NSF and Science will select winners in five categories: Photography, Illustrations, Posters & Graphics, Video Games & Apps, and Videos. The winning entries will appear in a special section of Science (with one entry chosen for the front cover) and be hosted at ScienceMag.org and NSF.gov. In […]
