A $500,000 grant from the National Science Foundation will help Indiana University researchers better understand how technologies can assist underserved older adults as they age in place. The grant has been awarded to School of Informatics and Computing Associate Professor Kay Connelly and Principal Research Scientist Kelly Caine, co-directors of the Pervasive Health Information Technology (PHIT) lab and core members of the Center for Law, Ethics, and Applied Research in Health Information. Full Story

Indiana University has replaced the software that provides its information services to mobile devices, moving to open source Kuali software that was created by a consortium of universities and companies. IU Mobile is live on all IU campuses and was ready for students when they arrived this fall. Each campus can tailor its information channels to meet its needs, and all previous IU Mobile services -- including athletics scores, class schedules, course content and bus routes -- will be accessible through the new service. The new system also makes it much easier for IU students, faculty and staff to add services to their mobile devices. Full Story

An interdisciplinary team of researchers led by two Indiana University Bloomington School of Informatics and Computing professors has been recognized with one of the most prestigious privacy technology awards for the team's work in uncovering how the genetic identities of human participants can be uncovered from the results of genome-wide association studies. The 2011 Award for Outstanding Research in Privacy Enhancing Technologies (the PET Award) was awarded to IU Associate Professors XiaoFeng Wang and Haixu Tang, along with graduate students Rui Wang, Yong Fuga Li and Xiaoyong Zhou, for their paper, "Learning our Identity and Disease from Research Papers: Information Leaks in Genome Wide Association Study." Full Story

Indiana University's Data To Insight Center will lead a $600,000 grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to fund the first investigation of non-consumptive research for a major mass digitized collection of content. Partners with D2I on this include the HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC) and the University of Michigan's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Non-consumptive research involves computational analysis of one or more books without the researcher having the ability to reassemble the collection. Rather than reading the material, researchers use specialized algorithms to analyze text as a massive data set and the Sloan grant will help ensure the work can be conducted in a secure environment. Full Story

The National Science Foundation has awarded faculty at IU School of Informatics at IUPUI $250,000 to further research and development of multiple online, sound-based educational games and reference materials for blind and visually-impaired K-12 students. These unique educational resources will utilize audemes -- short but complex, mnemonic collages of sound effects and music that do not rely upon traditional speech. Audemes are found to significantly enhance students' ability to imprint and recall academic information, and have particular utility among populations unable to visually process information. Full Story

The August 1, 2011, issue of IT Matters @ IU included an announcement about the opening of the new Cyberinfrastructure Building (CIB). Also in this issue are stories about the Indiana CTSI tech partnership with Big Ten universities; the IU Research Administration's international honor for innovation; an exclusive licensing agreement between the IURTC and Guidewave Consulting -- a start-up company created by a faculty member in the IU Bloomington School of Informatics and Computing; and an announcement about IU's involvement with the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment. Full Story