Today’s National Science Foundation (NSF) Science Nation features the work of Amy McGovern, an Associate Professor of Computer Science and Adjunct Associate Professor of Meteorology at the University of Oklahoma, whose data mining and predictive modeling approaches are transforming the way we predict tornadoes. According to the article: Tornadoes claim hundreds of lives and cause billions of dollars in damages in the United States. But the tornado outbreak across the South on April 27, 2011, was startling, even for veteran forecasters such as Greg Carbin at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Storm Prediction Center (SPC) in Norman, Okla.   “Through the 24-hour loop here, almost 200 tornadoes had occurred in […]

We’ve previously described in this space the Materials Genome Initiative (MGI) — a $100 million initiative announced last June to drastically accelerate the discovery, development, and manufacturing of new and advanced materials — describing the critical role to be played by the computer and information sciences and engineering research community, including via predictive modeling, simulation, and visualization capabilities. Now there’s an interesting news focus (subscription required) in this week’s Science, noting, “Supercomputing power now makes it possible to compute the properties of thousands of crystalline materials in a flash and is expected to guide experimentalists where to search for the next best things.” According to the article (following the link):

The computing research community lost a wonderful researcher, colleague, and friend last week. David L. Waltz, whose extraordinary contributions and service to the field included a term as member of the CCC Council during the founding years, passed away on Thursday. The New York Times‘s John Markoff has written an excellent tribute: David L. Waltz, a computer scientist whose early research in information retrieval provided the foundation for today’s Internet search engines, died on Thursday in Princeton, N.J. He was 68.   The cause was brain cancer, his wife, Bonnie Waltz, said. He died at the University Medical Center at Princeton.   During his career as a teacher and a technologist at […]

Mario Bergés (CMU) and Computing Innovation Fellow Zico Kolter (MIT) are co-organizing the first International Workshop on Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring, to be held on the campus of Carnegie Mellon University on May 7th. With support from Bosch Research, the workshop will provide a forum to unite researchers working on the topic of energy disaggregation, particularly on sensing and/or algorithms aspects. The workshop will review the main types of approaches that have been explored to date, and discuss possible paths forward. Key foci will include the growing need for standardized datasets and performance metrics that can allow the field to move forward, as well as possible areas of collaboration among research groups from multiple […]

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) today launched a new blog — Tech @ FTC — focused on technology and consumer issues. Through the blog, the FTC aims to provide a vehicle for the agency’s Chief Technologist to communicate about technology issues to both technology experts and the broader public. Ed Felten, on leave from Princeton University (where he’s Professor of Computer Science and Public Affairs) to serve as the first Chief Technologist at the FTC, wrote in his first post: …As the nation’s consumer protection agency, the FTC works on technology issues every day. You’ll see lots of discussion of technology in our reports, cases, speeches and testimonies, not to mention the consumer […]

On Tuesday, the National Institute of Standards and Technology announced a solicitation for proposals that support long-term research in next-generation semiconductor technology, calling the work “critical to the future of the U.S. electronics industry.” Through the solicitation, NIST plans to issue one award of up to $2.6 million in Federal cost-shared funding (a minimum of 25 percent of a project’s budget must come from non-Federal sources) for the project’s first year, with the potential for continued funding for up to five years. Proposals are due by 5pm EDT on Monday, April 16th. According to the solicitation: One area where a clear long-term technological challenge resides is in the development of new […]