Just in time for the kickoff of March Madness later today, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign computer science professor Sheldon Jacobson describes the mathematics behind bracketology — and BracketOdds, a website his research team developed that uses data from 27 past tournaments “to identify a distribution that models the probability of certain seed combinations playing each round of the tournament.” From the interview, posted on UIUC’s website: The tournament is exciting for its upsets and seeming unpredictability. Yet your research has found distinct patterns. How can that help people trying to make sense of it all?   Each game in the tournament can be viewed as a random experiment, with a different […]

Vijay Kumar, Professor of Mechanical Engineering & Applied Mechanics as well as Computer & Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania, delivered a fascinating talk at last month’s 2012 TED Conference in Long Beach, CA, summarizing recent advances in his General Robotics, Automation, Sensing and Perception (GRASP) Lab. Kumar described how his lab is blending computer science and mechanical engineering to create flying quadrotor robots, which “move together in eerie formation, tightening themselves into perfect battalions, even filling in the gap when one of their own drops out.” According to Kumar: [Agile aerial] robots like this have many applications. You can send them inside buildings as first responders to look for intruders, […]

Last February, the Computing Research Association (CRA) — the umbrella organization of the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) — launched an effort to engage the computing research community in a conversation about postdoctoral fellows, at a time when survey data were suggesting that a growing number of recent Ph.D.s in the field were pursuing postdoctoral fellowships — a trend that has continued. A white paper, the result of a CRA-commissioned committee, was posted to the web, presenting statistics about academic and industry hiring, and articulating relevant issues about postdoctoral fellows. The CRA sought input from the community, encouraging faculty, postdoctoral fellows, and graduate students to discuss the various issues and opine on […]

For the first time in the 37-year history of the distinguished honor, the National Science Foundation (NSF) today named two individuals — both computer scientists — as joint recipients of the 2012 Alan T. Waterman Award. Scott Aaronson of MIT and Robert Wood of Harvard were honored with the award, recognizing “an outstanding young researcher in any field of science or engineering” supported by NSF. Also for the first time, both Aaronson and Wood will receive $1 million grants over a five-year period to further their research, up from $500,000 awards in recent years. Aaronson was selected for his research on the limitations of quantum computers and computational complexity theory more generally. Wood received […]

The National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC) — the newest of the national synthesis centers funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) focused on fostering synthetic, actionable science related to the structure, functioning, and sustainability of socio-environmental systems — has issued a call for participation in a July workshop on visualization technologies that support research on human-environment interactions. Abstracts are due by April 20th, and travel expenses for lead authors will be covered by SESYNC. According to the call: One of SESYNC’s strategic goals is to foster the development of computational tools and services in support of researchers including scholars studying human-environment interactions.   SESYNC is hosting this workshop to focus especially […]

At a press briefing featuring high-ranking Federal, state, and local officials on its Gaithersburg, MD, campus last month, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) announced a new partnership to establish the National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence, a “public-private collaboration for accelerating the widespread adoption of integrated cybersecurity tools and technologies.” The Center received $10 million in the FY 2012 appropriations to cover startup costs, and expects to make available opportunities for grants to address identified needed technologies. According to the Center website: The Center brings experts together from industry, government and academia under one roof to develop practical, interoperable cybersecurity approaches that address the real world needs of complex […]