The three men in the image on the right have something in common: Rush Holt, who defeated IBM’s Watson at Jeopardy! earlier this year, Bill Foster, and Vern Ehlers have all served in the United States Congress. That makes them a fairly unique bunch. But they also have one other thing in common: they’re all scientists (physicists to be exact). And that makes them especially unique. As a New York Times‘ article pointed out earlier this week, there aren’t very many researchers in public service: When asked to name a scientist, Americans are stumped. In one recent survey, the top choice, at 47 percent, was Einstein, who has been dead since 1955, […]

A couple months ago, I blogged about David Ferrucci’s excellent keynote at this year’s Federated Computing Research Conference (FCRC) in San Jose, CA — noting how Ferrucci stepped through the creation of Watson, from conception of the “Jeopardy!” challenge in 2004 to the supercomputer’s nationally televised victory earlier this year. Well, now, ACM has made Ferrucci’s talk — along with the rest of this year’s FCRC plenaries — available through its Digital Library free of cost. Simply click here and create a free profile to either download or stream the 40-minute presentation.   And read the original summary of Ferrucci’s talk after the jump…

The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation has just announced a Request for Ideas (RFI) about Data Intensive Science: The increasing volume and complexity of scientific data are overwhelming current research practices, and create additional barriers to an already challenged science infrastructure, workforce and funding landscape. Many agencies and foundations are looking at ways to best combat the growing wave of challenges caused by today’s data deluge, and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation’s RFI on Data Intensive Science is intended to add to this growing body of thinking. This RFI is being conducted in the open and for the benefit of anyone looking to navigate these areas.   We welcome […]

The President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) released a report titled Sustaining Environmental Capital: Protecting Society and Economy, calling for improved accounting of ecosystem services and greater protection of environmental capital. The report notes the importance of the nation’s ecosystems and biodiversity to the overall economy, and recommends that the Federal government institute and fund a Quadrennial Ecosystems Services Trends (QuEST) Assessment that draws upon existing monitoring programs as well as newly recommended activities to identify trends related to ecosystem sustainability and possible policy responses. Importantly, PCAST also recommends that we expand the use of evolving informatics technologies — drawing from another recent PCAST report about networking and information […]

Fresh on the heels of announcing a call for social media research, DARPA’s Information Innovation Office (I2O) has issued a solicitation for “innovative research proposals in the area of automated program analysis for cybersecurity.” From the official broad agency announcement: Automated program analysis is a fundamentally hard problem. It has been known since the work of Church and Turing in 1936 that virtually any interesting question about the properties of programs is undecidable — that is, it is provably impossible to build an automated program analysis tool that will answer any question about cybersecurity for any program and input with complete accuracy…

Yesterday, the National Science Foundation (NSF) announced a new five-year, $18.5 million Engineering Research Center (ERC) that will pursue interdisciplinary research and education in areas of health and robotics: The NSF ERC for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering (ERC/SNE) will create devices to restore or augment the body’s capabilities for sensation and movement. The foundation for the new devices will be new mathematical and structural understanding of the nervous system. Center researchers will combine this new understanding with improved communication and interface design and with advanced control and adaptation technologies.   The Center aims to create devices that function and adapt seamlessly with the body, enabling dynamic and highly complex interactions with human […]