Congratulations to Miriah Meyer, one of our 2009 Computing Innovation Fellows — and now faculty at the University of Utah’s School of Computing — who was just named to the Technology Review‘s annual list of 35 Innovators Under 35! Here’s the TR35 write-up for Miriah: Biological research is exploding with genomic, molecular, and chemical data. But analyzing all that information has been difficult and slow, in part because biologists haven’t had good ways to visualize the data — to see it represented graphically on screen so as to help them spot trends and make comparisons. University of Utah computer science professor Miriah Meyer is addressing that problem by developing programs […]

The organizers of the second annual symposium on Computing for Development (DEV 2012) — to be colocated with the Fifth International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development (ICTD 2012) in Atlanta, GA, March 10-11, 2012 — have issued a call for papers: DEV 2012 provides an international forum for research in the design and implementation of information and communication technologies (ICTs) for social and economic development. In particular, we focus on emerging contexts where conventional computing solutions are often inappropriate due to various contextual factors – including, but not limited to, cost, language, literacy, and the availability of power and bandwidth. Focusing on innovative technical solutions to these unique application, infrastructure and user challenges, DEV fosters exchange […]

The NSF’s CISE Directorate has issued a Dear Colleague Letter (DCL), calling to attention the outputs of a multi-agency, invitational workshop on Cyber Security Data for Experimentation (CSDE). The workshop — which was held last year through the collaboration of the NSF, Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Office of Naval Research (ONR), and Treasury Department, as well as other Federal agencies — sought to find new ways for industrial partners to exchange relevant data with academic researchers. Academic, industry, and government participants engaged in spirited discussion and developed a deeper understanding of the issues involved in gaining access to industrial data sources and sharing research results based on those data…   One positive outcome […]

Sam Madden, Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), delivered a great talk about “The Rise of Mobile Data” at the “Computation and the Transformation of Practically Everything” symposium commemorating MIT’s 150th anniversary celebration earlier this year. Madden described his work in the area of sensor data analytics — specifically location analytics — which seeks to understand, make sense of, and process the wealth of data our smartphones are generating, all the while providing users control over privacy. [There are] going to be five billion cellphones in service in the world in 2011. That’s a pretty staggering number… there’s something like 6.8 billion people […]

Next month, a little more than a year after the National Science Foundation (NSF) launched the Future Internet Architecture (FIA) program, 100 researchers will gather in Palo Alto, CA, to discuss the progress in “content-centric networking” (CCN) — a new direction for organizing Internet traffic that aims to provide greater security and faster connectivity. Content-centric networking represents a shift from today’s focus on using network addresses to find content. Instead it proposes a protocol that specifically defines and tracks content. Backers say it represents an evolutionary change similar to IP forwarding.   “We think it’s definitely a concept that will change how people design high performance hardware,” said Jim Thornton, a principal engineer […]

As part of a multi-year cognitive computing initiative funded by DARPA and involving academic collaborators, Dharmendra Modha and his colleagues at IBM Research – Almaden have designed an experimental computer chip that emulates the brain’s cognitive powers. It’s a revelation that’s got the popular press abuzz today. From the IBM press release: In a sharp departure from traditional concepts in designing and building computers, IBM’s first neurosynaptic computing chips recreate the phenomena between spiking neurons and synapses in biological systems, such as the brain, through advanced algorithms and silicon circuitry. Its first two prototype chips have already been fabricated and are currently undergoing testing.   Called cognitive computers, systems built with these chips won’t be […]