As our colleagues on CRA’s Policy Blog have just noted, it appears Arati Prabhakar has been named the next director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Quoting a memo to DARPA staff: Dr. Prabhakar has spent her career advancing technology in support of both national security and the private sector, from early research and development through production. Dr. Prabhakar served from 1986 to 1993 at DARPA, first as program manager and then as founding director of the Microelectronics Technology Office. In 1993, President Clinton appointed Dr. Prabhakar as the Director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, where she led the 3,000-person organization in its work with companies […]

The National Coordination Office (NCO) for the Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) Program — the Federal program that provides a framework and mechanisms for coordination among 15 Federal agencies collectively investing over $4 billion annually in networking and information technology research and development — has announced plans to hold the third in a series of workshops to bring together experts from academia and industry to help “create and implement a plan to facilitate research, development, experimentation, and testing by researchers to explore innovative spectrum-sharing technologies, including those that are secure and resilient.” The workshop will take place on July 24, 2012, in Boulder, Colorado. According to the announcement (following the […]

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has issued a new solicitation for its 2013 Director’s Transformative Research Awards, which will support “exceptionally innovative, original, and/or unconventional research with the potential to create new scientific paradigms, establish largely new and improved clinical approaches, or develop transformative technologies.” Unlike many other NIH R01 competitions, “little or no preliminary data [are] expected.” The Transformative Research Awards are funded through NIH’s Common Fund, which includes among its broad themes “computational and informatics challenges.” According to the solicitation (following the link; emphasis added):

(This post has been updated; please scroll down for the latest.) Last December, we blogged about changes in the number of new Ph.D.s in computer science — a slight increase between 2009 and 2010, but the “fastest growth” of all science and engineering disciplines during the 10-year period ending in 2010, according to data from the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) annual Survey of Earned Doctorates (SED). Well, NSF is now out with more data, this time describing trends among graduate students and postdoctoral fellows — and the numbers are quite striking for computing (details after the jump).

At The Wall Street Journal’s annual CFO Network Conference in Washington, DC, last week, inventor and entrepreneur Ray Kurzweil spoke about “frontiers in technology,” discussing, among other topics, recent advances in artificial intelligence — and what they might mean for the future of the field. During his comments, Kurzweil referenced the Turing test and made an interesting prediction (emphasis added): “Alan Turing in 1950 defined a way in which we can say that a computer is operating at human levels. You have a human judge interview a computer and a human — maybe several of each. If the judge can’t tell which is which, we say the computers have passed the Turing test. […]

Harvard computer scientist and CCC Council member Margo Seltzer was interviewed last week about her thoughts on women in computer science: Txchnologist: Although women make up nearly half of the workforce in the U.S., the Department of Commerce reports that only one out of four employed computer scientists is female. Does this fit with what you see?   Margo Seltzer: It’s stunning. The numbers are bad, and they’re not particularly getting better globally. The only place that I’ve encountered worse numbers is actually finance and entrepreneurism. Those are the only events that I’ve ever gone to where I’ve felt that I was even more outnumbered.   Txch: What do you think accounts for the disparity? [more following […]