The White House has issued a request for public input on new technologies the U.S. government might pursue with research and development funds. The White House wants to offer a variety of “grand challenges” for inventors and scientists to tackle in the coming years. “The focus of this [Request for Information] is on hard, unsolved [...]

U.S. President Barack Obama has proposed spending $3.7 billion on science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education in his 2011 budget, including increasing funding of K-12 education by nearly 40 percent from a year ago to $1 billion. Obama’s plan also calls for tripling the number of U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowships [...]

Even as India has emerged as a growing hub of technological know-how and outsourcing business that the rest of the world admires, there is anxiety within India that the country is not living up to its innovation potential as reflected by its lack of trend-setting products. The Indian government and corporations invest significantly less on [...]

The Discovery and Innovation in Health IT Workshop, cosponsored by the Computing Community Consortium (CCC), attempted to make further progress on productive collaboration between computing and healthcare. The workshop investigated and characterized near- and long-term computing research challenges and opportunities in healthcare information technology (IT) and identified a spectrum of model proof-of-concept, integrative systems that [...]

The Bush administration’s edict that the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) give the lead role in information technology (IT) research projects to companies rather than academia has severely weakened the U.S. IT industry. Restoring the original model is key to undoing the damage and protecting the country’s global domination of IT, writes University [...]

In his recent address at Hudson Valley Community College in Troy, N.Y., U.S. President Barack Obama cited the need for the United States to strengthen its commitment to basic research, which he says is vital to the country’s global competitiveness. He stressed that tapping the Internet’s full potential is essential to U.S. innovation, and this [...]

Modern hospitals provide a glimpse into how people will interact with machines in the future, according to a new Gartner report on the future of human-computer interaction. Speech recognition is an example of how health care is leading the world in the use of new technology. Consumers can use voice-recognition systems that enable them to [...]

The United States must capitalize on emerging opportunities in order to regain the top spot in innovation, federal chief technology officer Aneesh Chopra said in a keynote address to the recent Open Government and Innovations Conference in Washington, D.C. The Obama administration is investing in technology such as healthcare information technology and the smart grid, [...]

Many technology industry leaders are worried that the United States is losing its innovative edge and that companies are focusing on short-term gains while sacrificing long-term technological dominance. “The trend lines show that we are not maintaining the kind of coordinated support behind innovation that we need to,” says venture capitalist Pascal Levensohn. “Innovation and [...]

University of Calgary (02/24/09)
University of Calgary professor Richard Hawkins says there is no evidence that information technology (IT) reduces the world’s environmental footprint. “It was once assumed that there was little or no material dimension to information technology, thus, it should be clean with minimal environmental impact,” says Hawkins, the Canada Research Chair in Science, [...]