Yesterday, CNBC.com published a slideshow of 10 products and companies that have changed the world. Calling them “game-changing disruptions,” CNBC.com reported: It takes a lot to shift the course of an industry. For every truly disruptive company, there are dozens that try and fail — and plenty of copycats that follow, but fall short of the new model.   Being disruptive doesn’t always mean being first to the market with an idea. It’s about executing it better than any competitor — and staying ahead of the curve from there. And, it turns out, being disruptive is often also about doing computer science! Nine of the top 10 products and companies […]

The NSF, NIH, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and McKesson Foundation announced this week a call for white papers on innovative methods to accelerate the evaluation of the efficacy and safety of mobile health technologies — in anticipation of a workshop later this year that will serve as the basis for defining a research agenda for evaluation of mHealth technology: Mobile health (mHealth) has the potential to simultaneously reduce the cost of health care and improve our health by encouraging healthy behaviors, providing continuous monitoring to prevent or reduce health problems, reducing acute health care visits, and providing personalized, real-time intervention in the mobile environment. However, traditional methods of evaluation needed to address efficacy and safety in mHealth are […]

Are you working on a really exciting research project? Do you have a cool finding? Well, how about making a short video describing it — and getting paid in the process? Following up on our successful Computing Research Highlights of the Week, the CCC is announcing today a call for short videos describing exciting research and results in computer science: Many undergraduates don’t have a clear sense of what computer science research is all about. A common misconception is that it must be all about writing really big and complicated programs. The CCC would like to have a collection of short videos that provide undergraduates with some concrete examples of […]

The following is a special contribution to this blog by Deborah Estrin, Professor of Computer Science and Founding Director of the NSF-funded Center for Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS) at UCLA, and Ida Sim, Associate Professor and Director of the Center for Clinical and Translational Informatics (CCTI) at UCSF.  Estrin and Sim co-organized an Open mHealth Summit April 14-15 in Washington, DC. Mobile health (mHealth) has the potential to transform the nature and reach of health care activities; however an increasing concern is that proliferating independent mHealth apps are emerging highly siloed with limited data sharing and limited interoperability. Such a stovepipe approach threatens to fundamentally limit the power and potential […]

The Interagency Multiscale Modeling and Analysis Group (IMAG) — comprising program staff from NIH, NSF, DoE, DoD, NASA, USDA, and the VA — announced earlier this month a new interagency funding opportunity to support the development of multiscale models to accelerate biological, biomedical, behavioral, environmental, and clinical research.  From the official program announcement: Multiscale models can be designed to integrate diverse data, create testable hypotheses leading to new investigational studies, identify and share gaps in knowledge, uncover biological mechanisms, or make predictions about clinical outcome or intervention effects.  These models can draw on a variety of data sources including relevant physical, environmental, clinical and population data. Ultimately multiscale models and […]

The NSF’s CISE Directorate, in partnership with the Office of Cyberinfrastructure and other directorates at the Foundation, has announced a call for Software Infrastructure for Sustained Innovation (SI2). In a Dear Colleague Letter issued this week: Software is an integral part of the computational paradigm for supporting innovation and discovery in science and engineering, and is a primary modality for realizing NSF’s Cyberinfrastructure Framework for 21st Century Science and Engineering (CIF21) vision… The crosscutting SI2 program is a long-term investment in this goal of transforming innovations in research and education into sustained software resources that are an integral part of the cyberinfrastructure.   SI2 proposals need to advance scientific research while […]