Last week, we reported on the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) Robotics Challenge, which will launch this October with a $2 million prize — plus up to $32 million in related R&D work — “to whomever can help push the state-of-the-art in robotics beyond today’s capabilities in support of the [Department of Defense’s’ disaster recovery mission.” Now our colleagues at IEEE’s Spectrum have published a Q&A with the DARPA program manager leading this challenge, Gill Pratt: Q: DARPA funds lots of robotics programs. What’s the goal and focus of this new effort? [more following the link]  

Computer scientist — and 2009 Computing Innovation Fellow (CIFellow) — Nick Diakopoulos recently published a white paper about the similarities between journalism and computer science that’s attracted quite a bit of buzz. In an article in Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab earlier this month: What if journalism were invented today? How would a computer scientist go about building it, improving it, iterating it?   He might start by mapping out some fundamental questions: What are the project’s values and goals? What consumer needs would it satisfy? How much should be automated, how much human-powered? How could it be designed to be as efficient as possible [more after the jump]?  

Later this month, the best and brightest cyber defense students from 10 universities throughout the country will descend on San Antonio, TX, for the 8th annual National Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition (CCDC) sponsored by Deloitte. The three-day final, which kicks off on April 20th, challenges participants on the “operational aspect of managing and protecting an existing ‘commercial’ network infrastructure”: You have just been hired as the network and security administrators at a small company and will be taking administrative control of all information systems. You know very little about the network, what security level has been maintained, or what software has been installed. You have a limited time frame to familiarize yourself with the […]

The National Science Foundation (NSF), through its cross-cutting Science, Engineering, and Education for Sustainability (SEES) initiative and together with the Department of Agriculture (USDA) and Department of Energy (DoE), is seeking proposals for its Earth Systems Modeling (EaSM) program. The goal of EaSM is to foster interdisciplinary efforts aimed at the “development and application of next-generation Earth System Models” that enable a better understanding of climate change, how it is likely to affect the world, and how we can plan for its consequences. Full proposals are due by May 11, 2012. According to the solicitation: This interdisciplinary scientific challenge calls for the development and application of next-generation Earth System Models that include coupled and interactive […]

This week’s Science magazine features a special section on computational biology: Today, the availability of vast quantities of new data, together with striking advances in computing power, is promising to give us new insights into the mechanisms of life. This special section … highlights recent advances and outstanding challenges. Such a section would be interesting by itself. But there’s one particular perspective — “Dusting Off the Turing Test” (subscription required) — that stands out. In the introduction to the special section, the editors of Science reference Turing: A discussion of computational biology has to start with a pioneer of the field, Alan Turing, especially in this centennial year of his birth. He introduced us […]

At an event at the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation (ITIF) in downtown Washington yesterday, White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) Deputy Director for Policy Tom Kalil expanded upon a blog post earlier this week describing the Administration’s keen interest in Grand Challenges — “ambitious yet achievable goals that capture the public’s imagination and that require innovation and breakthroughs in science and technology” as he called them. Kalil led off by describing past successes in science and technology enabled through the pursuit of Grand Challenges, from President Kennedy’s call to put a man on the moon to the Human Genome Project. He highlighted the decentralized, bottom-up efforts that have been exemplars recently, such as Jimmy Wales’ mission […]