Blog: Hopkins Researchers Aim to Uncover Which Mobile Health Applications Work

Hopkins Researchers Aim to Uncover Which Mobile Health Applications Work
Baltimore Sun (03/14/12) Meredith Cohn

Johns Hopkins University has 49 mobile health studies underway around the world as part of its Global mHealth Initiative. The initiative aims to evaluate which mobile strategies can aid doctors, community health workers, and consumers in ways equal to traditional methods. Pew Internet & American Life Project's Susannah Fox notes that more than 80 percent of Internet users have looked online for health information. Many of the 40,000 applications already available have practical purposes, such as helping patients adhere to drug regimens, helping people change harmful behaviors, and aiding in weight loss through texts about specific goals and behaviors. There also are pill bottles that send text messages when a person forgets to take their medicine. Meanwhile, mHealth researchers have developed software to help educate medical students, doctors, and other workers about how to care for burn victims. The researchers also have developed apps to train health workers caring for those with HIV and AIDS and to screen and support victims of domestic abuse. "What they all have in common is they increase how often individuals think about their health," says mHealth director Alain B. Labrique. "There is evidence that suggests some apps can have an impact."

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Blog: Scientists Tap the Genius of Babies and Youngsters to Make Computers Smarter

Scientists Tap the Genius of Babies and Youngsters to Make Computers Smarter
UC Berkeley News Center (03/12/12) Yasmin Anwar

University of California, Berkeley researchers are studying how babies, toddlers, and preschoolers learn in order to program computers to think more like humans. The researchers say computational models based on the brainpower of young children could give a major boost to artificial intelligence research. "Children are the greatest learning machines in the universe," says Berkeley's Alison Gopnik. "Imagine if computers could learn as much and as quickly as they do." The researchers have found that children test hypotheses, detect statistical patterns, and form conclusions while constantly adapting to changes. “Young children are capable of solving problems that still pose a challenge for computers, such as learning languages and figuring out causal relationships,” says Berkeley's Tom Griffiths. The researchers say computers programmed with children's cognitive abilities could interact more intelligently and responsively with humans in applications such as computer tutoring programs and phone-answering robots. They are planning to launch a multidisciplinary center at the campus' Institute of Human Development to pursue their research. The researchers note that the exploratory and probabilistic reasoning demonstrated by young children could make computers smarter and more adaptable.

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Blog: W3C CEO Calls HTML5 as Transformative as Early Web

W3C CEO Calls HTML5 as Transformative as Early Web
Computerworld Canada (03/06/12) Shane Schick

World Wide Web Consortium CEO Jeff Jaffe says HTML5 will be among the most disruptive elements to hit organizations since the early days of the Internet. "We’re about to experience a generational change in Web technology, and just as the Web transformed every business, [HTML5] will lead to another transformation," Jaffe says. HTML5 features cross-browser capability, improved data integration, and a better way of handling video. Jaffe says HTML5 makes Web pages "more beautiful [and] intelligent," and also provides for improved accessibility for disabled users. “It won’t really be a standard until 2014, but in the Web ecosystem, nobody waits,” he says. “They’ll make minor adjustments once the standard is done.” For example, TeamLab recently launched the TeamLab Document Editor, an online word processing program. Document Editor uses Canvas, a part of HTML5 that allows for dynamic, scriptable rendering of two-dimensional shapes and bitmap images. Jaffe says HTML5 could benefit a range of industries, including retail, air travel, and the automotive industry.

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Blog: Simulations and Mathematics Suggest That There Always Be a Facebook

Simulations and Mathematics Suggest That There Always Be a Facebook
National Center for Nuclear Research (03/02/12)

National Center for Nuclear Research (NCBJ) scientists are conducting research that could lead to the development of a field of mathematics focused on the theory of minority games. Minority games can be used to model social behavior patterns and reactions to financial markets, to optimize utilization of power distribution networks, and to analyze and manage road traffic. "Results obtained in many computer simulations done by us are not just interesting; we have also found some analytical expression to describe them," says NCBJ professor Wojciech Wislicki. Contrary to classical games, in minority games players do not know everything about the game and are reasoning inductively on the basis of their experience, a situation that more closely resembles reality. "The rules seem simple, but behavior of many agents governed by the rules exhibits very complex dynamics," notes NCBJ researcher Karol Wawrzyniak. The researchers also demonstrated how to use minority games theory to forecast winning moves by investigating the dependency of forecast accuracy on the number of participating players. They say groups in which players have transferred their individual strategies to one leader achieve the largest success.

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Blog: Microsoft to developers - Here's how touch is supposed to work

Microsoft to developers - Here's how touch is supposed to work

By Adrian Kingsley-Hughes | February 23, 2012, 12:34am PST

Summary: Good news for users … unless they’re a south paw.

Microsoft has released a document that tells developers how touch should work for Metro UI apps on Windows 8 systems.

While a lot of what’s in the four-page PDF document is common sense, there’s also some interesting research contained in the document. For example, the document highlights the best areas on a tablet screen for interaction and reading:

Blog: IBM Says Future Computers Will Be Constant Learners

IBM Says Future Computers Will Be Constant Learners
IDG News Service (02/17/12) Joab Jackson

Tomorrow's computers will constantly improve their understanding of the data they work with, which will help them provide users with more appropriate information, predicts IBM fellow David Ferrucci, who led the development of IBM's Watson artificial intelligence technology. Computers in the future "will not necessarily require us to sit down and explicitly program them, but through continuous interaction with humans they will start to understand the kind of data and the kind of computation we need," according to Ferrucci. He says the key to the Watson technology is that it queries both itself and its users for feedback on its answers. "As you use the system, it will follow up with you and ask you questions that will help improve its confidence of its answer," Ferrucci notes. IBM is now working with Columbia University researchers to adapt Watson so it can offer medical diagnosis and treatment. Watson could serve as a diagnostic assistant and offer treatment plans, says Columbia professor Herbert Chase. Watson also could find clinical trials for the patient to participate in. "Watson has bridged the information gap, and its potential for improving health care and reducing costs is immense," Chase says.

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Blog: Weave Open Source Data Visualization Offers Power, Flexibility

Weave Open Source Data Visualization Offers Power, Flexibility
Computerworld (02/08/12) Sharon Machlis

The open source Weave project is a platform designed to make it easier for government agencies, nonprofits, and corporate users to offer the public a way to analyze data. The platform enables users to simultaneously highlight items on multiple visualizations, including map, map legend, bar chart, and scatter plot. The benefits of Weave's interactivity go beyond the visual appeal of selecting an area on a chart and seeing matches highlighted on a map, notes Connecticut Data Collaborative project coordinator James Farnam. Weave aims to help organizations democratize data visualization tools, creating a way for anyone interested in a topic to explore and analyze information about it, instead of leaving the task solely to computer and data specialists, says Georges G. Grinstein, director of the University of Massachusetts at Lowell's Institute for Visualization and Perception Research, which created Weave. "Now [you're] engaging the public in a dialog with the data," Grinstein says. "That's why Weave is open source and free." Weave is so powerful that one of the challenges of implementing it is how to narrow down its offerings so that end users would not be overwhelmed with too many options, says the Metropolitan Area Planning Council's Holly St. Clair.

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