The National Science Foundation (NSF) and Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC) have just announced a new joint initiative — Failure-Resistant Systems (FRS) — that seeks to address “compelling research challenges in failure resistant systems that are of paramount importance to industry, academia, and society at large.” According to the solicitation, which spans NSF’s directorates for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) and Engineering (ENG) as well as the SRC (emphasis added): New approaches in the design of electronic circuits and systems are needed for products and services that continue to operate correctly in the presence of transient, permanent, or systematic failures. From large information processing systems supporting communications and computation, to small embedded systems targeting medical and […]

David Ferrucci, the IBM Research Staff Member who led the development of Watson — the question-answering system that bested human competitors on Jeopardy! in February 2011 — recently visited the National Science Foundation (NSF) to describe the fundamental advances underpinning the supercomputer. While there, Ferrucci took a few minutes to sit down for an interview by Helen Hastings, a senior at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (TJHSST) in Alexandria, Va., who earlier this year was named one of the recipients of the National Center for Women & Information Technology’s (NCWIT) 2012 Award for Aspirations in Computing. Hastings asked Ferrucci how he assembled his team, the challenges the team faced, what the Watson success means […]

Last October, we noted that NASA had announced plans to run an International Space Apps Challenge in early 2012, bringing together officials from international space agencies, scientists, and citizens in an effort to use publicly-released scientific data to create, build, and invent new solutions that address challenges of global importance, from the impact of weather upon the global economy to the depletion of ocean resources. The effort culminated this past weekend in a 48-hour global event in which over 2,000 participants developed more than 100 unique solutions addressing 71 challenges. According to the International Space Apps Challenge Blog (following the link):

The National Science Foundation (NSF) last week issued a new solicitation under its Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) program, providing a specific track for training the next generation of researchers in computational and data-enabled science and engineering. The solicitation is part of the Foundation’s (and Administration’s) Big Data Initiative, which was announced last month. According to the new solicitation (emphasis added): Building upon the IGERT platform, the purpose of this IGERT solicitation is to support new models in graduate education in which students are engaged in an environment that supports innovation to learn through hands-on experience how their own research may contribute in new ways to benefit society and to learn the processes for the successful […]

The following is a special contribution to this blog from Klara Nahrstedt and Roy Campbell, faculty at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Mohamed Gouda, program director at the National Science Foundation (NSF). The trio recently organized and ran a NSF-sponsored workshop on Security for Cloud Computing. Cloud computing is becoming an integral part of our computing and communication ecosystem, offering great opportunity for cost-effective large-scale processing and storage capabilities. Major service providers including Google, HP, Amazon, Microsoft, and IBM are offering cloud computing services not only to corporations but also to general users and at affordable prices. As we step closer to utility computing and “cloud services for everybody,” a major question is, “How […]

The Association for Computing Machinery’s Council on Women in Computing (ACM-W) yesterday named MIT’s Nancy Lynch its 2012-13 Athena Lecturer, recognizing Lynch for her advances in distributed systems enabling dependable Internet and wireless network applications. The Athena Lecturer award, which comes with a $10,000 honorarium provided by Google, “celebrates women researchers who have made fundamental contributions to computer science.” According to the press release: “Lynch’s work has influenced both theoreticians and practitioners,” said Mary Jane Irwin, who heads the ACM-W Athena Lecturer award committee. “Her ability to formulate many of the core problems of the field in clear and precise ways has provided a foundation that allows computer system designers to find ways […]