The Cyber-Enabled Discovery and Innovation program will award $26 million in grants next year to support research into a wider range of uses for high-powered computing. Recipients will be called on to apply computational thinking to real-world problems involving engineering and computer science, as well as for biology, economics, and other social sciences. Sirin Tekinay, head of the National Science Foundation’s new program, says advanced computational thinking is about the process of sorting out data, deriving knowledge, gaining an understanding of complexity, and then developing new sociotechnical systems. All areas of science and engineering stand to benefit from this type of computing, which has helped clear the way for the decoding of the human genome, the production of complex real-time, satellite-aided maps, and the development of the Internet. For the program, innovation is defined as research that has the potential to produce transformative outcomes. Research institutions can apply for more than one grant, but a researcher cannot be named in more than two proposals during a competition cycle.
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University of Washington computer science professor Pedro Domingos is developing CALO, a massive, four-year-old artificial intelligence project to help computers understand human intentions. The DARPA-funded project involves researchers from 25 universities and corporations focusing on many areas of artificial intelligence, including machine learning, natural-language processing, and Semantic Web technologies. CALO, which stands for “cognitive assistant that learns and organizes,” tries to help users by managing information about key people and projects, understanding and organizing information from meetings, and learning and automating routine tasks. For example, CALO can learn about projects and who is involved in those projects, so emails from those people can be given priority and categorized based on subject matter. CALO can also be used to make transcripts of meetings through voice recognition, or perform routine tasks such as purchasing books online, searching for a hotel that meets specific criteria, scheduling meetings, and coordinating people’s schedules. The ultimate goal is to build an artificial intelligence that can serve as a personal assistant that can learn about a user’s needs and preferences and adapt to them without having to be reprogrammed. “It’s an amazingly large thing, and it’s insanely ambitious,” Domingos says. “But if CALO succeeds, it’ll be quite a revolution.”
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Technological advancements in sensing technology makes it possible to take more accurate measurements of brain activity, something computer scientists and neuroscientists say could lead to the discovery of the complex neuronal networks in the brain that allow for simple, automatic movements such as reaching for a glass of water. Virginia Tech and General Motors Research are opening the Laboratory for Neuroinformatics for the purpose of creating algorithms that process the massive amounts of data neuroscientists collect from the brain. The lab will be co-directed by Virginia Tech computer science professor Naren Ramakrishnan and General Motors research scientist K.P. Unnikrishnan. “Neuroscientists are making the transition from studying neurons to studying networks–the sequences of firings and spikes of activity across big groups of neurons,” Ramakrishnan says. “What we are trying to do is analyze all this data and discover something about the network–the connections and relationships.” Unnikrishnan says the many possible applications of neuroscience-related research include analyzing data from cars and maintaining vehicle health. But even greater applications are possible, Unnikrishnan says. “Creation of brain-machine interfaces is the next frontier,” Unnikrishnan says. “Giving senses to people who have lost them–vision, touch, hearing, and motor–would be a contribution to humanity.”
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