Around this time every year, the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) typically issue a joint guidance memo to Federal agencies describing the Administration’s R&D priorities for the next budget cycle. This year’s memo — specifying priorities for the FY 2014 budget — was released last week. It encourages agencies to focus on ambitious “grand challenges,” and directs agencies to prioritize research investments over development activities. Because of the crucial government role in supporting research, in general agencies should give priority to funding for research above funding for development activities. Within research portfolios, agencies are encouraged to identify and pursue “Grand Challenges” — ambitious goals […]

As we described in this space yesterday, this morning at an event at the White House, the Obama Administration will formally launch the US Ignite Broadband Initiative, an at-scale, nationwide innovation ecosystem for developing and deploying public sector applications and services on ultra-high-speed, software-defined networks. The announcement will be streamed live beginning at 9am EDT — and we’ll cover it below (more after the jump…).

(This post has been updated; scroll down for the latest.) At a White House event Thursday morning, the Administration will formally announce new steps to expand and improve access to next-generation broadband technologies and applications — including the launch of US Ignite, a new public-private partnership spanning more than 100 members that will seek to bring together computing researchers, software and application developers, broadband carriers, and broadband users so that they can take advantage of ultra-high-speed, programmable broadband networks. The US Ignite partnership is being largely convened by the National Science Foundation (NSF), with the support of other Federal agencies, industry, non-profits, and local communities. Its key mission will be to leverage NSF’s […]

If you’re like most of us, you’ve already spent some time stuck in traffic today. As it turns out, on average, each of us spends 50 hours in congestion every year. Well, Stanford University computer scientist Balaji Prabhakar is experimenting with a possible solution — incentive-based approaches, from reward points to lottery cash prizes, that encourage a portion of rush-hour commuters to shift their commutes to the hour before or after peak travel times. The New York Times‘s John Markoff has an excellent piece describing Prabhakar’s work — including early trials on the Stanford campus, in Bangalore, and in Singapore — in today’s Science Times: London, Singapore, Stockholm and a few other cities around the world […]

The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) — together with the Case Foundation and the Joyce Foundation — is hosting an event Tuesday on Public Sector Prizes, seeking to further understand the role of incentive prizes and challenges in the public sector — and to catalyze future initiatives in this space. A portion of the event will be streamed live via the web for those interested. According to an OSTP announcement (following the link):

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has issued a solicitation — Spatial Uncertainty: Data, Modeling, and Communication — for innovative research that identifies sources of spatial uncertainty in public health data, incorporates the inaccuracy into statistical methods, and develops novel tools to visualize the nature and consequences of the spatial uncertainty. The solicitation, which spans 7 NIH institutes, offers deadlines of February 5, June 5, and October 5 through summer 2014. According to the NIH (following the link):