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 […]

Recently-departed Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Director Regina Dugan gave a “breathtaking” TEDTalk at the 2012 TED Conference in Long Beach, CA, in late February, describing some of the extraordinary projects — a robotic hummingbird, a prosthetic arm controlled by thought, etc. — funded by her agency, and the paths to success. Dugan began: You should be nice to nerds. In fact, I’d go so far as to say, “If you don’t already have a nerd in your life, you should get one.” I’m just sayin’.   Scientists and engineers change the world.   I’d like to tell you about a magical place called DARPA where scientists and engineers defy the […]

The Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) has announced a new basic research initiative seeking to bring together the computational hardware, software, aerospace sciences, physics, and applied mathematics communities “to develop a novel and unique capability to design, optimize, build, and deploy specialized high-performance computing platforms to speed development of Air Force systems.” According to the AFOSR’s Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) (emphasis added): The history of high-performance computing, indeed computational modeling in general, has been portrayed as an arms race between ever faster computer hardware, often characterized by the ubiquitous Moore’s law describing the exponential growth in our ability to put computing machinery onto integrated circuits, and the equally advancing capability […]