Ed Seidel, NSF’s Assistant Director for Mathematical and Physical Sciences and formerly the Director of the Foundation’s Office of Cyberinfrastructure, today delivered a presentation at Northwestern University on “Data and the Compute-Driven Transformation of Modern Science” as part of a quarterly seminar jointly sponsored by the school’s Physics and Astronomy departments.  Seidel noted the exponential growth in the last couple of decades in data from scientific experiments and simulation, and in the computational power to deal with it, and he emphasized the greater need for collaboration.  No longer can science be done with just a single professor working with just a couple of students.  “Software is the Modern Language of Science.” Seidel described many challenges.  He mentioned three crises: […]

The New York Times picks up on a point made in the recent report of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology assessing the Federal Networking and Information Technology R&D program:  “performance gains in doing computing tasks that result from improvements in software algorithms often far outpace the gains attributable to faster processors.” “The rate of change in hardware captured by Moore’s Law, experts agree, is an extraordinary achievement. ‘But the ingenuity that computer scientists have put into algorithms has yielded performance improvements that make even the exponential gains of Moore’s Law look trivial,’ said Edward Lazowska, a professor at the University of Washington. “The rapid pace of […]

Lots of interesting stories touching on computing research in The New York Times and Time magazine in the past couple weeks: – Feb. 28 — Remapping Computer Circuitry to Avert Impending Bottlenecks — Hewlett-Packard researchers have proposed a fundamental rethinking of the modern computer for the coming era of nanoelectronics — a marriage of memory and computing power that could drastically limit the energy used by computers. – Carrots, Sticks, and Digital Health Records — The United States is embarking this year on a grand experiment in the government-driven adoption of technology — ambitious, costly and potentially far-reaching in impact. The goal is to improve health care and to reduce its long-term […]

Keith Marzullo, a Division Director within the NSF’s CISE Directorate, recently sat down to describe his experiences working at the National Science Foundation. “As a Division Director of [Computer and Network Systems] — CNS — I have a very broad view of what now is going on in research in my area. I’m going to conferences I never went to, because it’s now my job to understand what’s going on — and it’s really exciting. I’m getting a birds-eye view of everything that’s going on in the nation in terms of research in computer networks and computer systems. I wish I had done this 10 years ago. I think, had […]

“A funding ecosphere that allowed, or possibly even encouraged, a postdoctoral position (or, in some cases, a stint in an industrial research lab or another industrial position) before taking an academic job seemed beneficial, from the standpoint of allowing many researchers freedom and flexibility.  [But] a setting where such positions came to be seen as mandatory seemed very worrisome, especially if it created an atmosphere where multiple sequential postdoctoral appointments became the norm.” That’s just a snippet of what the computing research community is saying in response to the Computing Research Association (CRA)-led white paper on PostDocs.  As you’ll recall, in early February, the CRA launched an effort to engage the computing research community in a conversation about PostDocs, […]

If you haven’t seen it already, the February 11 issue of Science magazine is worth a look.  It contains a special section — titled “Dealing with Data” — that describes the challenges and opportunities arising from the wealth of scientific data being generated. As the staff of Science writes in the overview piece: If we can use and reuse scientific data better, the opportunities, as indicated in many examples in this special section, are myriad. Large integrated data sets can potentially provide a much deeper understanding of both nature and society and open up many new avenues of research. And they are critical for addressing key societal problems—from improving public […]