The Computing Community Consortium:

From Spatial Computing to Computing in Healthcare

By Kenneth D. Hines, CCC Program Associate

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) has a standing RFP for activities with the potential to excite the computing research community, grow funding, and encourage broader segments of society to participate in computing research and education. This fall, the CCC funded two visioning activities: one on Spatial Computing and the other on Smarter Health. 

The Spatial Computing workshop titled, “From GPS and Virtual Globes to Spatial Computing – 2020,” was held on September 10^th – 11^th, 2012 at the National Academies Keck Center in Washington, DC. The workshop, led by Shashi Shekhar (University of Minnesota), sought to promote a unified agenda for spatial computing research development across U.S. agencies (e.g. Department of Defense, Department of Energy, Department of Transportation, National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation) industries (e.g. IBM, Microsoft, Google AT&T, Garmin, ERI, UPS, Rockwell, Lockheed Martin, Navteq, etc.) and universities across the nation.  The workshop identified some of the key research challenges within spatial computing such as spatial cognition, localization, and navigation indoors and inside the human body. A blog entry that summarizes some of the highlights from the workshop can be viewed here.

The computing in healthcare symposium, “Computing and Healthcare: New Opportunities and Directions,” was held on October 11^th – 12^th, 2012 at the Marriott in Bethesda, MD, and was co-chaired by Beth Mynatt (Georgia Tech) and Gregory Hager (Johns Hopkins University). The symposium was a follow-up to a CCC funded workshop held in October of 2009 titled “Discovery and Health Innovation in Health IT.” The goal of the symposium was to bring segmented communities (biomedical informatics, computer science, clinical medicine and public health) together and release the potential of cross-community collaboration. Dr. J. Michael McGinnis, Senior Scholar at the Institute of Medicine delivered an opening plenary by providing perspective on the current and future challenges of healthcare in the digital age. The symposium focused on three themes: Exploiting Data In Abundance, Creating Systems for Collaborative Care, and Focusing on Patient Engagement. More information about the workshop can be viewed on our blog.

The CCC welcomes creative ideas from all segments of the computing research community. Our intent is to support all reasonable ideas that have potential. Each proposal will be reviewed on its own merits based on its potential to be a compelling vision and to engage a large segment of the research community. Larger proposals must be further along the visioning pipeline than smaller proposals, and they must have greater potential. For more information on our RFP and to submit a proposal please visit: http://www.cra.org/ccc/vision.php