The International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging (ISBI) held a grand challenge to evaluate computational systems for the automated detection of metastatic breast cancer in whole slide images of sentinel lymph node biopsies. Our team won both competitions in the grand challenge, obtaining an area under the receiver operating curve (AUC) of 0.925 for the task of whole slide image classification ...

Since the United States’ National Academy of Engineering’s Grand Challenges were first publicly articulated in 2008, engineering educators have used its ideas to motivate their work. While there is a sense of moral imperative around pursuing selected Challenges, work that critically examines the ethics of the Grand Challenges has so far been rare. In this paper, examining the process surroundin...

European Union is an important global actor in terms of economy, welfare and soft security but its institutional development and ambitions has to consider both the issues of grand challenges, resilience, disaster management, in accordance with its citizens’ will and skills. The Lisbon Treaty as well as the recent legislation on civil protection produced incremental change and improved the Emerg...

"Space drives," "Warp drives," and "Wormholes:" these concepts may sound like science fiction, but they are being written about in reputable journals. To assess the implications of these emerging prospects for future spaceflight, NASA supported the Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Project from 1996 through 2002. This Project has three grand challenges: (1) Discover propulsion that eliminates the...

The problem of reasoning from experience in the presence of adversaries found a potent symbol in Descartes’ famous “demon deceiver”: the philosopher wondered how a reasoner might acquire reliable knowledge about the world if his sensory input could be corrupted by a hostile third party. This challenge to empirical philosophy is also a grand challenge for systems that operate within and learn fr...

Over forty years ago, Jerome Bruner proposed a radically new theory of education, that "...any subject can be taught effectively in some intellectually honest form to any child at any stage of development." [1]. While many have disputed the more extreme claims attached to that hypothesis, it is anadmirable goal, though one difficult to achieve. One way to implement this theory is through the “s...

This position paper gives an overview of model-based testing and discusses how it might fit into the proposed grand challenge for a

Computational prediction of reaction outcomes and optimum synthetic routes was a two-day meeting and workshop organised by the EPSRC Dial-a-molecule grand challenge network. Forty delegates discussed computer predictions of synthetic routes and reactions, and considered their relevance to contemporary chemistry.

Education and Work online at: New and unprecedented standards for mathematical and computation literacy have emerged for the nation’s workforce. Generated by the science-intensive and digitally driven global economy, today’s careers in health science, engineering, value added manufacturing, and nano-fabrication require advanced mathematics. The importance of mathematical and computational compe...