Calling all developers! Late this afternoon, the White House and Department of Labor announced the Summer Jobs+ Code Sprint, “challenging the developer community to build apps that reach kids throughout the nation on their browsers, Facebook, Android, iOS, SMS or any other platform.” The Labor Department released an API that opens access to thousands of summer internship, mentorship, and other training opportunities through the Summer Jobs+ Bank — which seeks to provide low-income and disconnected youth access to these opportunities. This is the first ever White House Code Sprint and we’re excited to see what innovative apps you build over the next seven days. There is no ideal app, but keep in mind that our […]

This week’s Science magazine features two perspectives (subscription required) authored by three computer scientists — Diane Cook (Washington State University), Michael O’Grady (University College Dublin), and Gregory O’Hare (University College Dublin) — describing visions for future “smart” homes and cities and, notably, the computing research challenges that must be addressed for these visions to become reality. In the first piece about smart homes, Cook writes: Individuals spend most of their time in their home or workplace; for many, these places are their sanctuaries. Over the course of the 20th century, technological advances have helped to enhance the comfort and shelter provided by our homes. Insights gained from capturing and modeling behavior in these places may be useful in making […]

An article in today’s New York Times that’s making the rounds — written by Randall Stross, an author and professor of business at San Jose State University: READING, writing and — refactoring code?   Many professors of computer science say college graduates in every major should understand software fundamentals. They don’t argue that everyone needs to be a skilled programmer. Rather, they seek to teach “computational thinking” — the general concepts programming languages employ.   In 2006, Jeannette M. Wing, head of the computer science department at Carnegie Mellon University, wrote a manifesto arguing that basic literacy should be redefined to include understanding of computer processes. “Computational thinking is a fundamental skill for everyone, not […]

As we’ve covered extensively, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), together with six Federal agencies, rolled out the Big Data R&D Initiative on Thursday afternoon, providing $200 million in funding to improve our ability to extract knowledge and insights from large and complex collections of digital data. Highlights included a $25 million solicitation supporting foundational research, including core techniques and technologies, spanning all directorates and offices within the National Science Foundation (NSF) and 7 institutes of the National Institutes of Health (NIH); a $250 million “Data to Decisions” investment by the Department of Defense’s (DoD) Assistant Secretary of Defense for Research & Engineering [ASD(R&E)], constituting a major push in data to decision, autonomy, and human systems; and a […]

Congratulations to Sanjeev Arora, the Charles C. Fitzmorris Professor of Computer Science at Princeton, who yesterday was named the recipient of the 2011 ACM-Infosys Foundation Award in the Computing Sciences for his “contributions to computational complexity, algorithms, and optimization that have reshaped our understanding of computation.” According to an ACM–Infosys press release: Arora’s research revolutionized the approach to essentially unsolvable problems that have long bedeviled the computing field, the so-called NP-complete problems. These results have had implications for problems common to cryptography, computational biology, and computer vision, among other fields [more following the link].  

(This post has been updated; please scroll down for the latest.) The Obama Administration this morning unveiled details about its Big Data R&D Initiative, committing more than $200 million in new funding through six agencies and departments to improve “our ability to extract knowledge and insights from large and complex collections of digital data.” The effort, spearheaded by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and National Science Foundation (NSF), along with the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Department of Defense (DoD), Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Department of Energy (DoE) Office of Science, and U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), seeks to “advance state-of-the-art core technologies needed to collect, store, preserve, manage, analyze, and share huge quantities of data; harness these technologies to accelerate […]