The following is a contribution to this blog from Parisa Rashidi, Assistant Professor in the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University. In this blog entry, Dr. Rashidi describes a symposium being held in Arlington, Virginia, November 2-4 2012, titled AI for Gerontechnology, which she is co-chairing.  The aging population, the increasing cost of formal health care, caregiver burden and the importance that older adults place on living independently in their own homes motivate the need for the development of technologies (Gerontechnology) that promote safe independent living. These user-centric technologies need to address various aging related physical and cognitive health problems such as heart disease, diabetes, deterioration of physical function, […]

GNS Healthcare, a healthcare analytics company and Aetna, an American managed health care organization, are collaborating to make use of GNS’ supercomputer “REFS” (Reverse Engineering and Forward Simulation). By using predictive analytics with Aetna claims and other health information, the REFS platform will create data models to help the early identification of metabolic syndrome, which increases the risk of heart disease, stroke and diabetes. To see how REFS works with data and creating models, watch the video below: Read more about the collaboration from the GNS Healthcare press release below:

As we’ve previously blogged, Mozilla and the National Science Foundation (NSF) have teamed up for a challenge, called “Mozilla Ignite“, which focuses on the development of apps for faster, smarter internet of the future. Apps were designed to address needs in advanced manufacturing, education and workforce technologies, emergency preparedness and public safety, healthcare technologies and clean energy and transportation. The brainstorming round completed on August 23rd which brought in over 300 ideas from the community. Mozilla announced a total of eight winners, with one grand prize award. The grand prize winner from the brainstorming round went to Jeremy Cooperstock, director of the Shared Reality Lab at McGill University in Canada. Here […]

Today, the National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded $50 million for research projects designed to help build a secure cyber society and protect the US infrastructure. The awards come from the Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace Program (SaTC), which “builds on [NSF’s] long-term support for a wide range of cutting edge interdisciplinary research and education activities to secure critical infrastructure that is vulnerable to a wide range of threats that challenge its security.” The funded projects include two frontier awards — The first award, titled “Beyond Technical Security: Developing an Empirical Basis for Socio-Economic Perspectives“, is a multi-institution collaboration between Stefan Savage, University of California, San Diego, Vern Paxson, International Computer Science […]

A couple weeks ago, we featured the Institute of Medicine’s (IOM) release of a new landmark study titled Best Care at Lower Cost: The Path to Continuously Learning Health Care in America. One of the recommendations in the report is “to accelerate integration of the best clinical knowledge into care decisions.” IBM’s Watson, the supercomputing system that topped the world’s best human players at Jeopardy! last spring, is one example of leveraging advances in computer science to accelerate knowledge into healthcare decisions. As we’ve noted here previously, not only can Watson operate at the speed of 80 teraflops, but it can also over time learn which algorithms to run in which situations. The obvious example of […]

The following is a contribution to this blog from Robin Murphy, Raytheon Professor of Computer Science and Engineering and director of the Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue at Texas A&M University. Back in April, Robin co-organized a visioning workshop about the role of computing in disaster management (including preparedness, prevention, response, and recovery). In this blog entry, Robin describes her participation at a workshop held last week in DC on Connecting Grassroots to Government for Disaster Management.  I participated in the Wilson Center’s workshop on Connecting Grassroots to Government for Disaster Management last week where I briefed 60 physical and 150 remote participants on the NSF/CCC Workshop on Computing for Disaster Management and the subsequent […]