Seeking to motivate the development of novel solutions to serious computer security threats, Microsoft Corp. has launched an inaugural BlueHat Prize contest, offering a grand prize of $200,000 to the most innovative submission. In particular, Microsoft aims “to challenge security researchers to design a novel runtime mitigation technology designed to prevent the exploitation of memory safety vulnerabilities.” According to the contest website, submissions must:

IBM is out with its sixth annual “Five in Five” list, specifying five technology innovations that have the potential to change the way we live, work, and play over the next five years. It’s a list that has met with some success over the years — for example, a 2007 prediction that “cell phones will be wallet, ticket broker, concierge, bank, shopping buddy, and more” has largely come to fruition. So what’s on this year’s list of science fiction stories that could be reality by the year 2016? Find out after the jump…

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has announced its Young Faculty Award (YFA) program for 2012, seeking to “identify and engage rising stars in junior faculty positions [i.e., untenured Assistant or Associate Professors within five years of appointment to a tenure-track position] in academia and expose them to Department of Defense (DoD) needs.” Among the core technical topic areas — exactly one of which must be specified in any proposal — are quantum science and technology; mathematics; predictive materials science; advanced electronics; MEMS/NEMS; digital direct manufacturing; neuroscience (including brain-machine interfaces); computational and quantitative social, decision, and behavioral sciences; and robotics. From DARPA’s official Research Announcement (RA):

An excellent example of how novel data-driven methods can advance science and society: In February 2012, the journal Nature Climate Change will publish a paper on rainfall extremes in India by principal investigator Vipin Kumar of the University of Minnesota’s computer science and engineering department and co-principal investigator Auroop Ganguly of the civil and environmental engineering department at Northeastern University in Boston, members of the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) [Expeditions in Computing] project team…   “This Expeditions in Computing project brings together interdisciplinary researchers from multiple institutions to pursue a bold, ambitious, research agenda by building reliable predictive models from climate data that could potentially transform how we understand and respond to climate change,” explains Vasant Honavar … program manager in NSF’s Division of Information and Intelligent […]

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), together with the recently created Center of Excellence for Collaborative Innovation (COECI), launched the USPTO Innovation Challenge last week, offering $50,000 in prizes for specialized algorithms that can “help bring the 7 million patents presently in the patent archive into the digital age.” In particular, the USPTO Innovation Challenge is seeking new algorithms to automatically identify and locate specific elements within patent documents, as part of a broader effort to improve the patent examination process. According to Robynn Sturm Steffen, a Senior Advisor in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP): Approximately half-a-million U.S. patents are filed by inventors, entrepreneurs, and businesses […]

In the December 2011 Communications of the ACM, CCC Council member and MIT Professor of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science Frans Kaashoek discusses multicore computing, security, and OS design: Kaashoek has … conducted wide-ranging research in computer systems, including operating system design, software-based network routing, and distributed hash tables, which revolutionized the storage and retrieval of data in decentralized information systems. He also helped found two startups: Sightpath, a video broadcast software provider that was acquired by Cisco Systems in 2000, and Mazu Networks, which was acquired by Riverbed Technology in 2009. Kaashoek was named an ACM fellow in 2004 and elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2006. […]