Back in February, we noted that the National Science Foundation and Science were partnering to run another International Science & Engineering Visualization Challenge to celebrate the grand tradition of visualization — specifically for communicating science, engineering, and technology for education and journalistic purposes. Well, now the submissions are being put to a public vote — with winners to be published in Science and on Science Online. Among this year’s entries are a number of interactive video games that are advancing science and engineering (after the jump):

An interesting example in today’s New York Times about computing in sustainability: …The humble household thermostat.   A boring wall fixture and an unlikely target for innovation? Not to [Tony] Fadell [a former Apple executive who led iPod and iPhone development from 2001 to 2009], his team of 100 computer hardware and software experts and the venture capitalists backing his Silicon Valley start-up, Nest Labs…   Unlike other thermostat manufacturers, Nest Labs has a sizable team of specialists in the branch of artificial intelligence called machine learning, including Yoky Matsuoka, who came from Google and whose work won a MacArthur Foundation award…   They see the conventional thermostat as a dumb […]

Robin Murphy, Raytheon Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Texas A&M University (and a member of the CCC Council), and Mary Fernández, Executive Director of Distributed Computing Research at AT&T Research, are among several computing researchers featured on msnbc.com’s Future of Technology website this afternoon — as part of a series of wide-ranging videos about new technologies for emergency response. This last decade has seen one disaster after another hit every corner of the earth. And for each catastrophe, researchers and tech companies have deployed new tools to help search for victims, clear rubble, and aid survivors…   For even faster search and rescue, [researchers] are working on a project […]

We blogged about brain-computer interfaces early last week — and it turns out there was a related talk later in the week by Gerwin Schalk, a Research Scientist at the Wadsworth Center, during MIT’s 2011 Emerging Technologies Conference. Schalk described his lab’s pioneering methods for controlling computers with thoughts instead of fingers: [In 1968], Doug Engelbart actually showed for the first time how it is possible to use a mouse, a graphical interface, and networked computers to … augment human function. The idea of course was to offload some of the … clerical tasks that we used to perform as humans to a computer that [could] hopefully do these things much faster…   So the vision […]

Today the Computing Community Consortium is issuing a call for nominations for individuals to serve on the CCC Council for three years beginning January 2012. The deadline for nominations is 11:59pm EST on Nov. 15, 2011. The complete call appears below. The Computing Community Consortium Seeks Nominations for Council Members   What questions shape our intellectual future? What attracts the best and brightest minds of a new generation? What are the next big computing ideas — the ones that will define the future of computing, galvanize the very best students, and catalyze research investment and public support?   The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is charged with catalyzing and empowering the U.S. […]

During a webinar earlier this afternoon, the National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI) — spanning 25 Federal agencies engaged in nanotechnology research — released its 2011 Environmental, Health, and Safety (EHS) Research Strategy, “a comprehensive, integrated approach to produce the research data that will ensure the safe, effective, and responsible development and use of nanotechnology” in the coming years. The EHS Research Strategy, which updates a 2008 version, summarizes the current state of nano science and provides guidance to agencies as they develop their agency-specific EHS research programs. Importantly, for the first time, the research strategy includes a core area of research in predictive modeling and informatics — at the same level as nanomaterial measurement, human exposure […]