Over the past year, we have blogged extensively in this space about the promise of “big data” — noting the enormous volume and heterogeneity of data, as well as the velocity of its generation, across nearly all areas of science, engineering, and society. Now, California-based enterprise storage and data management company NetApp has produced an infographic describing big data at the 2012 Summer Olympics, noting the sheer volume of data expected to be generated by social networks, connected devices, and broadcast companies throughout the world. NetApp notes “the figures are staggering,” with over 60 gigabytes of information expected to flow across British Telecom’s networks every second — the equivalent of all of Wikipedia every five seconds. Check out the impressive […]

Vipin Kumar, the William Norris Professor and head of computer science and engineering at the University of Minnesota, will receive the Association for Computing Machinery’s (ACM) Special Interest Group on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (SIGKDD) 2012 Innovation Award at the opening plenary of the 18th international ACM SIGKDD Conference next Sunday in Beijing, China. Since 2000, the annual award has been “conferred on one individual or one group of collaborators whose outstanding technical innovations in the KDD field have had a lasting impact on advancing the theory and practice of the field.” According to SIGKDD, the citation for Vipin’s award reads as follows (after the jump):

The Information Technology & Innovation Foundation (ITIF) — a non-partisan, Washington, DC-based think tank that aims to formulate and promote public policies to advance technological innovation and productivity globally — has released a short report calling for a R&D roadmap for privacy, together with a companion website enabling researchers to openly collaborate on creating a privacy research agenda. Noting that “effectively addressing privacy concerns … will require a mix of new technologies and policies to ensure data is properly safeguarded and consumers are protected,” the report emphasizes that a roadmap would “help address consumer privacy concerns, better align R&D investments with strategic objectives, and enable more innovation.” According to the report (following the link):

In cooperation with the International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS), the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is pleased to invite submissions to a Challenges and Visions Track at AAMAS 2013, to be held in St. Paul, Minnesota, May 6-10, 2013. The emphasis of this track is on visionary ideas, long-term challenges, and new research opportunities that are outside the current mainstream of the field. In this way, this track will serve as an incubator for innovative approaches, risky and provocative ideas, and to propose challenges and opportunities for the field in the near future.

Judea Pearl received the 2011 ACM A. M. Turing Award “for fundamental contributions to artificial intelligence through the development of a calculus for probabilistic and causal reasoning.” In this guest post, Douglas Fisher, associate professor of computer science and computer engineering at Vanderbilt, summarizes Pearl’s Turing Award Lecture, delivered at last week’s AAAI Conference. Professor Pearl delivered his Turing Award Lecture as the opening invited address at the 26th AAAI Conference in Toronto, Canada, last week. He opened by acknowledging the support of the AAAI community in a great collaborative enterprise, a remarkable “journey” as he said, and he shared the award with the community and his coauthors. He also cited […]

IBM and IEEE have partnered to launch the Smarter Planet Challenge, seeking “creative team-based student projects that can help students at any level learn about applying engineering, science, and other disciplines to solve real world problems.” The competition — which will dole out prizes ranging from $1,000 to $5,000 to the top five entries — allows students to submit either completed projects or ideas in any one of five areas of interest (following the link):