National Science Foundation (NSF)

When, in February 2013, the White House issued a directive stating that all larger federal agencies (agencies that spent over $100 million R&D annually) should make the results of any federally funded research available to the public within a year of publication, Open Access advocates cheered. [...] However, a new bill [...] now threatens to reverse the progress made earlier in the year. Read More »

The first major deadline for agency compliance with President Obama's open data Executive Order arrived this past Saturday. Agencies were required to, among other things, provide the Office of Management and Budget with an "Enterprise Data Inventory" and release a list of all their public data via a /data page on their websites. Read More »

A new open-source, artificially intelligent prosthetic leg designed by researchers at the University of Michigan and Shirley Ryan AbilityLab is now available to the scientific community. The leg's free-to-copy design and programming are intended to improve the quality of life of patients and accelerate scientific advances by offering a unified platform to fragmented research efforts across the field of bionics. "Our Open-Source Bionic Leg will enable investigators to efficiently solve challenges associated with controlling bionic legs across a range of activities in the lab and out in the community," said lead designer Elliott Rouse, core faculty at U-M's Robotics Institute and assistant professor of mechanical engineering.

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This year's three-day OSEHRA Open Source Summit promises to be the most diverse ever, highlighting open source initiatives across a dozen Federal and State agencies, and showcasing industry progress in key areas such as emerging hybrid proprietary/open source interoperability solutions and synthetic patient data generation...This year's agenda includes a combination of engaging track sessions, town-hall discussion, and plenary events. The content will be exceptionally diverse, including: An interoperability platform demonstration drawing healthcare data from multiple health record systems; A demonstration of synthetic patient data generation, including the first public demonstration of tailored synthetic data being loaded into the open source VistA Electronic Health Record (EHR) via a new open source data loader...

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Additive manufacturing, also known as 3-D printing, is replacing conventional fabrication processes in critical areas ranging from aerospace components to medical implants. But because the process relies on software to control the 3-D printer, additive manufacturing could become a target for malicious attacks – as well as for unscrupulous operators who may cut corners. Researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology and Rutgers University have developed a three-layer system to verify that components produced using additive manufacturing have not been compromised...

Nobody likes a cheater, but Rice University bioengineering graduate student Karl Gerhardt wants people to copy his answers. That’s the whole point. Gerhardt and Rice colleagues have created the first low-cost, easy-to-use optogenetics hardware platform that biologists who have little or no training in engineering or software design can use to incorporate optogenetics testing in their labs. Rice’s Light Plate Apparatus (LPA) is described in a paper available for free online this week in the open-access journal Scientific Reports...

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