(This post has been updated; please scroll down for the latest.) Yesterday, the National Science Foundation (NSF) announced a competition for Sustainability Research Networks (SRNs) — part of the broader NSF investment in Science, Engineering, and Education for Sustainability (SEES) — seeking to foster collaborative, multi-disciplinary approaches for pursuing the fundamental science and engineering necessary to understand and overcome barriers to sustainable human well-being. From the official solicitation: Sustainability Research Networks will engage and explore fundamental theoretical issues and empirical questions in sustainability science, engineering, and education that will increase our understanding of the ultimate sustainability challenge — maintaining and improving the quality of life for the nation within a healthy Earth system. […]

The Associated Press and Google have teamed up to create Journalism and Technology Scholarships that foster digital and new media skills in student journalists. The scholarships will provide $20,000 to six promising undergraduate or graduate students pursuing or planning to pursue degrees at the intersection of journalism, computer science and new media during the 2012-2013 academic year. Have you created original journalistic content with computer science elements? Do you have an idea to develop new ways of telling a story with technology? Are you a “techie” who knows how to construct a journalistic story through multimedia? If you’re on the cutting edge of digital media beyond the classroom, this scholarship is for you!   […]

Today’s New York Times reports on a Stanford AI course that will be available online and has already attracted nearly 60,000 students.

Last week, the National Institutes of Health announced a call for the 2012 Director’s New Innovator (DP2) Award program, an initiative created in 2007 to stimulate highly innovative research and support promising new investigators. Many new investigators have exceptionally innovative research ideas, but not the preliminary data required to fare well in the traditional NIH peer review system. As part of NIH’s commitment to increasing opportunities for new scientists, it has created the NIH Director’s New Innovator Award to support exceptionally creative new investigators who propose highly innovative projects that have the potential for unusually high impact. This award complements ongoing efforts by NIH and its institutes and centers to fund new […]

Ever tried baking — yes, baking — and found it challenging? Well, try teaching it to a robot. That’s just what a group of researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have done. Graduate student Mario Bollini, a member of Daniela Rus’s Distributed Robotics Lab, has spent the past several months programming the R&D platform PR2 robot developed by Willow Garage to bake cookies from scratch: While the project was originally intended as a simple introductory project, it has turned out to be quite challenging due to all of the nuances involved with programming a robot to follow a lengthy list of tasks, while also employing vision, object […]

Leslie Valiant, the winner of the 2010 A.M. Turing Award for his “transformative contributions to the theory of computation,” delivered the Turing Lecture at the 2011 Federated Computing Research Conference, held in San Jose, CA, in early June. Valiant’s lecture — titled “The Extent and the Limitations of Mechanistic Explanations of Nature” — is now online (after the jump):