News

In order to accelerate the development of new drugs to combat and cure major infectious diseases, Professor A.K. Ganguly of the Department of Chemistry, Chemical Biology & Biomedical Engineering at Stevens Institute of Technology is contributing his expertise and passion to the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) Open Source Drug Discovery initiative. Read More »

Open source software missed out on making a major advance into health care when it was bypassed during hospitals’ recent stampede toward electronic health records, triggered over the past few years by Meaningful Use incentives...As Meaningful Use ramps down and clinicians have to look for value in EHRs, can the open source options provide what they need?

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When Oroville Hospital decided to digitize its patient medical records three years ago,...chief executive Robert Wentz...did something almost unheard of for a health care executive: he went open source. As the saying goes in this conservative industry, no one gets fired for picking Epic. Wentz’s decision is not for the squeamish or the straight-laced. It forced long-time hospital administrators with tight schedules and deadlines to loosen up and collaborate with a network of free agents—open source programmers who voluntarily support a publicly available electronic health record called VistA...

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Twitter, Facebook, the Library of Congress -- all of these institutions have mind-numbing amounts of structured and unstructured data that must be indexed and searched quickly...So it's not surprising that such institutions would venture into the seemingly untamed world of open-source search applications, not just for the cost savings, but also for the ability to customize and modify applications quickly...But what about other enterprise users?  Read More »

Open Source for America (OSFA)...today launched a petition to “Free the Code,” in an effort to encourage the government to release custom-developed, taxpayer-funded software as open source by default. “Free the Code is an initiative to start a national conversation on taxpayer investments in software and information technology,” said John Scott, president of Selection Pressure, LLC and co-chair of Open Source for America's steering committee... Read More »

In the days following the Jan. 10, 2010, earthquake in Haiti, chaos prevailed. Transportation was limited, if not impossible. Lines of communication were broken. A few radio stations continued to broadcast, but the disaster’s scale was overwhelming. Only one form of mass communication remained relatively intact: cellular phones. Even before the disaster, there had been only 108,000 landbased telephone lines in the country, compared with 3.5 million mobile phones. After the earthquake, mobile communications, particularly text messages, were one of the few means by which people could report their needs and location...

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