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Inducing Innovation With Prizes

sparky3887 — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 03:01:56 +0000

The successful completion of the Netflix Prize competition demonstrates that prizes are a viable mechanism for encouraging research in the computing fields, writes Harvey Mudd College professor Ran Libeskind-Hadas. In the broader computing community, the Clay Mathematics Institute now offers Millennium Prizes, which are awards of $1 million for solutions to each of seven famous open problems, such as whether P=NP. Researchers might not gear their work toward prizes, but one determined that a specific small (2 states and 3 symbols) Turing Machine is universal in 2007 to win a $25,000 prize sponsored by Wolfram Research. The history of prizes for technical innovation goes back to the early 18th century, when the British Parliament offered the Longitude Prize to encourage researchers to come with a practical method for determining a ship’s longitude. Libeskind-Hadas says the industry should consider whether certain issues could be incentivized by prizes, but also address the potential risks of such an approach to research.

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White House Seeks Public Input on Innovation Goals

sparky3887 — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 20:55:21 +0000

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 scientific or engineering challenges that will have significant economic or societal impact and address an important national priority,” the White House says. It also is asking the public how the progress of these projects should be monitored and what the appropriate roles are for the government and other stakeholders. The effort follows the administration’s open government strategy to increase citizen participation in government. The White House says it is working with Anil Dash’s nonprofit Expert Labs to “explore new ways of tapping the expertise of the American people on these grand challenges.”

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Obama Budget Boosts Science, Innovation

sparky3887 — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 00:01:54 +0000

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 to 3,000 by 2013, providing $500 million to the U.S. Department of Education’s Investing in Innovation Fund. Meanwhile, NSF, the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science, and the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology would get a 6.6 percent increase in funding to $824 million in 2011, and their budgets would be doubled within five years. A record $66 billion would be spent on non-defense research and development (R&D). Obama also wants to make the federal research and experimentation tax credit permanent, and start an approximately $12 million program for commercializing innovations in government R&D.

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In India, Anxiety Over the Slow Pace of Innovation

sparky3887 — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 01:12:23 +0000

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 research and development (R&D) than other nations, and Indian companies funded by venture capitalists are far fewer compared to overseas. Infosys co-founder Nadathur S. Raghavan says India is being constrained by a number of factors, including an educational system that focuses on rote learning rather than problem solving, a financial system that tends to shun investment in unproven concepts, and a culture that frowns on failure and atypical career choices. Analysts say entrepreneurial ventures such as Sloka Telecom are more likely to generate the next wave of jobs than big, entrenched Indian tech firms. Indian Institute of Management professor Rishikesha T. Krishnan says that entrepreneurship continues to be restrained by government control over such sectors as manufacturing. In the United States and elsewhere, wealthy individuals or angel investors provide the seed capital for many startups, but in India most rich investors prefer to invest with relatives or close friends because it is thought to be less risky. Nevertheless, innovation researcher and former tech entrepreneur Vivek Wadhwa says the climate for Indian startups has improved substantially over the last few years, and it should continue to improve partly because companies such as General Electric have recruited scores of engineers in India to work in R&D. He anticipates that these engineers will inevitably outgrow the companies they are working for and establish new firms with entrepreneurs that previously failed with startup attempts.

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A Report on the Discovery and Innovation in Health IT Workshop

sparky3887 — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 00:26:34 +0000

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 might fuel fundamental healthcare IT research, according to the University of Utah’s Chris Johnson. He notes that healthcare and biomedical research have become increasingly interwoven with computing, and he cites the 2004 National Institutes of Health Roadmap’s observation that “because computation is integral to biomedical research, its deficiencies have become significant limiters on the rate of progress of biomedical research.” Johnson stresses that there must be collaboration between agencies and communities to augment frontier or cutting-edge research at the intersection of computing and healthcare. Meanwhile, CCC member Beth Mynatt of Georgia Tech says the workshop “allowed space for the discussion of long-term challenges that, when addressed, could also solve many short-term deficiencies.” She points out that numerous breakout groups at the event concentrated on strategies for patient-centered care, chronic disease management and prevention, and distributed, collaborative care. In addition, they urged computing research in challenging areas such as ubiquitous computing technologies for chronic disease management; organizational modeling and simulation to forecast the economic impact of future healthcare approaches; machine-learning methods to anticipate future health trends and treatment complications; security and privacy models for distributed, patient-centered care; and workflow and decision-support systems that actively embed health outcome data.

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Is the U.S. Killing Its Innovation Machine?

sparky3887 — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 01:08:35 +0000

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 of California, Berkeley professor and former ACM president David A. Patterson. Another flaw in the Bush-era DARPA operational model was the requirement that DARPA-funded programs reach milestones in 12 to 18 months or face cancellation, a prospect that Patterson calls “absurd.” He writes that as a result of these policies, “not much progress has been made in solving some of the biggest IT problems confronting us. One worth singling out in particular is developing technology so software can run on multi-core, or parallel, processors.” Patterson says that under the leadership of Tony Tether, DARPA allocated tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to private companies, but none of the research they performed with those funds has made much of a dent in the parallel processing challenge. He warns that if another nation successfully meets this challenge, “the software center of the universe could move from the United States to someplace else.”

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President Obama Touts Role of Basic Research in Innovation

sparky3887 — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 00:42:39 +0000

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 entails faster and more wide-scale broadband deployments and the implementation of rules to guarantee that the Internet remains fair and open to all U.S. residents. Obama noted Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski’s announcement of guidelines designed to achieve this goal. He announced his proposal of grants through the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the National Science Foundation to investigate “the next communications breakthroughs, whatever they may be.” Obama also said that he has established a goal to invest three percent of U.S. Gross Domestic Product into basic research and development, which he said has been badly neglected for decades. “When we fail to invest in research, we fail to invest in the future,” Obama said. “Yet, since the peak of the Space Race in the 1960s, our national commitment to research and development has steadily fallen as a share of our national income.”

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Innovation: Get to Hospital to See the Future

sparky3887 — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 21:15:06 +0000

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 make hands-free phone calls and to control computer systems, but the technology’s current state of usability is largely due to the rehabilitation industry. The greatest achievement of modern voice recognition is enabling people who are unable to physically use a mouse or keyboard to access technology. For these people, voice recognition is as much a medical device as an office aid, and many of them supported and used the technology when it was far below its current quality. Haptics is another technology with consumer potential that is currently being used in medicine, primarily for remote surgery, training, and interpreting complex scans. The computer interface technologies that will likely be the most common in the future are currently available in hospitals, including mind-controlled computers. The victims of accidents and injuries are the first to receive technological implants to control technology. By testing and developing technology in the medical field, not only can technology researchers refine and improve the technology by observing its actual use, but the designs benefit from the safety and usability requirements established by regulators such as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

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Federal CTO Says U.S. Lagging in Innovation

sparky3887 — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 03:18:48 +0000

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, and these investments offer the United States an opportunity to take the lead in these areas, he said. “Driving game-changing innovation” will be a focus of Chopra, who added that open data standards, research and development investment, and preparing the workforce for jobs of the future will help spur innovation. Chopra cited a report from the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation that ranks the United States last among 36 countries on technology metrics such broadband activity, research and development tax credits, and immigration policy. “We have failed to translate the power and potential in our nation’s capacity to compete in a more globally competitive marketplace,” he said.

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Innovation Waning, U.S. Leaders Worry

sparky3887 — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 00:15:29 +0000

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 entrepreneurship, the crucial growth engines of the U.S. economy, are at risk of stalling out.” Levensohn says the U.S. is in danger of losing its technological edge unless leaders enact new approaches to pursuing innovation. He says that three major trends–a growing focus on incremental innovation instead of basic research, declining research spending, and the global recession–have created a “technology investment plight.” Open-ended scientific research leads to breakthrough innovations, such as the development of the laser and the Internet, but such research is expensive and does not guarantee a direct payoff. Meanwhile, later-stage spending on research and development, geared toward new products, has declined in the United States while other countries have increased their research and development investments. The global financial crisis and failure of large financial institutions is only deepening the problem. A study from the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) that used 16 indicators to assess the global competitiveness of 40 nations and regions found the U.S. has made the least progress on improving international competitiveness and innovation during the last decade. “The U.S. still has enormous strengths in capacity and performance,” says ITIF report author Robert Atkinson. “But we’re in worse shape than people think. We’ve been losing ground relative to every other nation.”

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