Latest News

Delivering a Customer-Focused Government Through Smarter IT

A core part of the President’s Management Agenda is improving the value we deliver to citizens through Federal IT. That’s why, today, the Administration is formally launching the U.S. Digital Service. The Digital Service will be a small team made up of our country’s brightest digital talent that will work with agencies to remove barriers to exceptional service delivery and help remake the digital experience that people and businesses have with their government. Read More »

WHO Declares Ebola An International Health Emergency

The director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO) has proclaimed the Ebola outbreak in West Africa as a Public Health Emergency of International Concern, triggering an urgent international step-up in the response to the crisis, which it now sees as a serious threat to other countries, too. Read More »

The Road to a Career in Open Source and Science

My journey from bench scientist to open science software developer and how I develop better tools for open, reproducible scientific research. Read More »

Costa Ricans Design Mobile App to Report Dengue Breeding Sites

A free app that allows the public to report pools and other areas of water where dengue-carrying mosquitoes have laid their eggs could help control outbreaks of the disease in Costa Rica and beyond, say its developers and health officials. Costa Rican company GeoTecnologías joined forces with the country’s Ministry of Health to develop the Dengue Breeding Report application. The app allows the public to report mosquito ‘hatcheries’ to the ministry and will allow the ministry to map this data. Read More »

Universal Language: The Pistoia Alliance Takes on Indescribable Biology

Best Practices WinnerThe Pistoia Alliance has previously sponsored new methods for querying databases and the scientific literature, and a more effective algorithm for compressing and sharing genetic sequencing data. Over the past year, another Pistoia project, HELM, has entered the public domain after gradual development by an assortment of Alliance members. An open source language and set of editing tools for working with large biomolecules, HELM has already become a foundational part of research in at least three large pharmaceutical companies. Read More »

The Future of Scientific Discovery Relies on Open Science Models

Ross Mounce is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Bath studying the use of fossils in phylogeny and phyloinformatics, completing his PhD at the University of Bath last year. Ross was one of the first Panton Fellows and is an active member of the Open Knowledge Foundation, particularly the Open Science Working Group. He is an advocate for open science, and he is actively working on content mining academic publications to reuse scientific research in meta-analyses to gain higher level insights in evolutionary patterns... Read More »

Drones Spread Wings From War Zones To Disaster Areas

While lawmakers around the world struggle to keep up with the growth in the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) — commonly known as drones — innovation and community participation are changing how this weapon of modern warfare can be used for humanitarian purposes. Read More »

Mexican Team Builds Navigation Device For Blind People

Mexican researchers have developed an artificial intelligence navigation system for partially or totally blind people that can sense its surroundings in three dimensions. The prototype device is designed to allow users to freely move from one point to another avoiding both static and moving obstacles, and can learn to recognise colours and utility bills. Read More »

Real Time Big Data Analytics for Clinical Care

Recently, Dr. Chris Longhurst, chief medical information officer at Lucile Packard Children's Hospital, and colleagues wrote an article in the Big Data Issue of Health Affairs, that suggests a very practical approach for enabling real time analytics within an EHR. They call it the Green Button.

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Spain's Extremadura Region Switches Healthcare Sector to Open Source

The desktop computer systems of government healthcare organizations in the Spanish region of Extremadura all rely on free and open source software solutions. Over the past year, close to 10,000 computer workstations in public health care organizations have migrated to a customized version of the Debian GNU/Linux distribution. Read More »