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Archive for January, 2012

DARPA Announces Proposers Day for New PERFECT Program

January 31st, 2012

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) Microsystems Technology Office (MTO) has announced a Proposers Day for a new program — Power Efficiency Revolution for Embedded Computing Technologies (PERFECT) — to introduce the research community to the PERFECT vision and goals, and to facilitate interaction and coordination among prospective PIs and technology developers. The Proposers Day will take place on February 15, 2012, in Arlington, VA.

The PERFECT program seeks to “provide the technologies and techniques to overcome the power efficiency barriers that currently constrain embedded computing systems capabilities and limit the potential of future embedded systems.” Importantly, a key component of this is resiliency, an area for which a recent CCC visioning activity on Cross-Layer Reliability led by Andre’ DeHon, Nick Carter, and Heather Quinn proffered a research roadmap.

From the Proposers Day announcement (following the link):

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Posted in research horizons, resources

“Go Viral to Improve Health”

January 30th, 2012

The Institute of Medicine (IOM) and National Academy of Engineering (NAE) have partnered to launch the “Go Viral to Improve Health” Health Data Collegiate Challenge, designed to spur undergraduate and graduate students to create health-related apps. The contest is aimed at students pursuing degrees in health, engineering, and computer science. And the prize for the winning team is $10,000.

According to the Challenge website (after the jump):

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Posted in research horizons, resources

“The Mathematics of Taste”

January 28th, 2012

Ever wondered how companies determine the best flavors and scents for their packaged food, drinks, cleaning products, toiletries, and so many more items? Well, turns out it’s a multibillion-dollar business, with millions of dollars spent every year on R&D, including consumer testing. But if colleagues at MIT have their say, the way of this business could soon change:

[Though] the big flavor companies spend tens of millions of dollars every year on research and development, including a lot of consumer testing… making sense of taste-test results is difficult. Subjects’ preferences can vary so widely that no clear consensus may emerge. Collecting enough data about each subject would allow flavor companies to filter out some of the inconsistencies, but after about 40 flavor samples, subjects tend to suffer “smell fatigue,” and their discriminations become unreliable. So companies are stuck making decisions on the basis of too little data, much of it contradictory.

One of the biggest flavor companies in the world has turned to researchers in MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) for help. To analyze taste-test results, the CSAIL researchers are using genetic programming, in which mathematical models compete with each other to fit the available data and then cross-pollinate to produce models that are more accurate still [read more by following the link below].

» Read more: “The Mathematics of Taste”