I’ve just returned from Japan advising the “Mt. Fuji” team on UAVs for the Fukushima nuclear situation and I’ll be going back next week with a team of experts and robots to assist several prefectures with tsunami damage inspection and the grim task of underwater victim recovery.  (Read more about this in The New York Times.)  This will be the Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue’s (CRASAR) twelfth response since the first use of rescue robots at the 9/11 World Trade Center collapse just short of a decade ago. What has changed in rescue robotics in the last 10 years?  The robots, of course!  Rescue robots originally meant small ground vehicles […]

The following is a special contribution to this blog by Peter Lyster, Program Director for biological modeling and bioinformatics in the Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology at the NIH’s National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS).  Peter describes ways to find and apply for NIH funding opportunities that may well be relevant for computing researchers. The Biomedical Information Science and Technology Initiative (BISTI) is a consortium of representatives from each of the NIH’s institutes and centers that serves as the focus of biomedical computing issues at the NIH.  Established in May 2000, BISTI’s mission is “to make optimal use of computer science and technology to address problems in biology and […]