I notice that CACM Editor-in-Chief Moshe Vardi’s letter in the July 2010 issue of CACM speaks to what he calls “Hypercriticality,” and cites my post of May 4 here on the CCC Blog. (You can find Moshe’s letter in CACM vol. 53, no. 7, p. 5; if you are logged into the CACM website, you can find it here.) Moshe appears to agree that we in the computing research community are often too harsh when reviewing one another’s work. (Contributed by John Leslie King, University of Michigan)

Last week it was Jeopardy! superstar Ken Jennings who was facing competition. This week it’s assistants everywhere. In the second in a fascinating series of articles titled “Smarter Than You Think” being published by The New York Times Magazine this summer, writers Steve Lohr and John Markoff illustrate how artificial intelligence is transforming how we answer questions, complete simple tasks, and assist one another. This Sunday’s story highlights the work of Eric Horvitz, a member of the CCC Council, whose team at Microsoft Research has developed a “medical avatar” that can understand speech, recognize symptoms of pediatric conditions, and reason according to simple rules. The avatar is able to interface […]

Ken Jennings, the man known for his record-breaking streak of 74 consecutive wins and $2.52 million in earnings on the popular TV quiz show Jeopardy! back in 2004, may have some competition on his hands. This Sunday’s New York Times Magazine contains an incredibly fascinating expose about “Watson,” an advanced “question answering” machine that IBM researchers have been busy developing for the past half-decade.  The story provides a step-by-step account of the challenges and research advances underlying Watson’s development — including a detailed description of how Watson works today.  It chronicles early wins — and, notably, losses — for the supercomputer versus real-life former Jeopardy! contests.  And it describes ways in which natural language processing and data mining advances […]

Please see the new NSF/CISE FY11 cross-cutting program, Smart Health and Wellbeing, which we announced on Friday, June 11: http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2010/nsf10575/nsf10575.htm. We are looking for your great ideas for how advances in computer and information science and engineering can transform the nature and conduct of healthcare and wellness as we know it today. (Contributed by Jeannette Wing, Assistant Director for NSF/CISE)

The Computing Community Consortium recently prepared a white paper titled, “Information Technology Research Challenges for Healthcare: From Discovery to Delivery,” as a follow-on to the Discovery and Innovation in Health IT Workshop that the CCC co-sponsored with various Federal agencies in October 2009. The paper describes basic research opportunities that can catalyze transformations in healthcare — an enterprise that costs U.S. taxpayers $2.3 trillion (yes, that’s trillion!) each year but, by all accounts, is poorly equipped to handle the evolving needs of patients and providers. A multitude of factors — poor diet habits, stressful lifestyles, aging populations, etc. — is causing chronic diseases like cancer and arthritis to soar, and […]

On May 4 I posted a short message titled “Fratricide and the Ecology of Proposal Reviews.”  That was an effort to focus attention on an issue.  This post provides a suggestion for computing researchers when dealing with work that seems unfamiliar or difficult to understand. Computing is a “general purpose” phenomenon.  It can be applied to many things, which brings heterogeneous communities to the discussion.  The computing research field has porous boundaries, making it an intellectual watering hole.  This offers stimulation and excitement, but it can cause problems.  People from different fields follow different conventions for doing or explaining their work.  Philipe van Parijs has addressed this as Clarity and […]