The following is a special contribution to this blog from Nabil R. Adam, a professor of computer and information systems and director of the recently-established information Technology for Emergency mAnageMent (i-TEAM) Research Laboratory at Rutgers University. Nabil has been on leave as a fellow at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Science and Technology Directorate for the last four years, and in June 2010, he organized and ran a workshop focused on emergency management. Here Nabil summarizes the workshop and some of the key themes that emerged. The Department of Homeland Security recently hosted a workshop titled “Emergency Management: Incident, Resource, and Supply Chain Management” at the University of California-Irvine’s […]

From Google’s Research Blog this afternoon: Human language is both rich and ambiguous. When we hear or read words, we resolve meanings to mental representations, for example recognizing and linking names to the intended persons, locations or organizations. Bridging words and meaning — from turning search queries into relevant results to suggesting targeted keywords for advertisers — is also Google’s core competency, and important for many other tasks in information retrieval and natural language processing. We are happy to release a resource, spanning 7,560,141 concepts and 175,100,788 unique text strings, that we hope will help everyone working in these areas [more after the jump]…  

At last week’s meeting of the Advisory Committee (AC) for the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE), Computer and Network Systems (CNS) Division Director Keith Marzullo delivered a presentation summarizing the Foundation’s research infrastructure programs, notably the Foundation-wide Major Research Infrastructure (MRI) program and CISE-specific Computing Research Infrastructure (CRI) program. Marzullo’s talk, and the ensuing discussion, served to illustrate that both initiatives constitute great opportunities for the CISE research community. According to the solicitations: The Major Research Instrumentation Program (MRI) serves to increase access to shared scientific and engineering instruments for research and research training in our Nation’s institutions of higher education, museums, science centers, and not-for-profit organizations… To accomplish these […]

Last fall, the Department of Defense (DoD) issued a Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) for its Defense University Research Instrumentation Program (DURIP), which “augments current university capabilities or develops new university capabilities to perform cutting-edge defense research.” At the time, the BAA specifically encouraged proposals “for instrumentation supporting research in robotics.” Today, the DoD is announcing the results of the competition — $54.7 million in awards to purchase state-of-the-art research equipment — and at least a dozen of these awards involve robotics research. According to the DoD press release (following the link):

The organizers for this year’s second KDD workshop on Data Mining Applications in Sustainability (SustKDD 2012) have issued a call for papers. The workshop seeks to bring together researchers working on applications of Knowledge Discovery and Data-mining (KDD) to sustainability in diverse areas, especially in infrastructures such as IT, Smart Grids, water, and transportation. From the call for papers (following the link):

An article published in Nature this afternoon is generating some buzz in the news media, largely for the advances in fundamental computing research, particularly with respect to brain-machine interfaces. From a msnbc.com story: The stroke that disconnected Cathy Hutchinson’s brain from her body has kept her silent and unable to move for more than 14 years. But science is starting to change all that.   Researchers have connected the 58-year-old woman’s brain to a computer that runs a robotic arm. As Hutchinson sits at a table staring at a bottled drink and imagining the robot grabbing the bottle and bringing it to her mouth, the robot arm begins to move.   The […]