The National Science Foundation (NSF), together with the National Institutes of Health (NIH), NASA, and U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), yesterday issued a new solicitation for the National Robotics Initiative (NRI), seeking small (one or more investigators, funded at a rate of up to $250,000 in direct costs per year for up to five years) and large (multi-disciplinary teams, up to $1 million in direct costs per year for three to five years) proposals that support fundamental research enabling “the realization of co-robots acting in direct support of individuals and groups.” Up to $50 million in funds are available in the coming year. Small proposals are due Dec. 11th; large proposals by Jan. […]

The National Science Foundation (NSF) announced an organizational realignment last week, including plans to integrate the Office of Cyberinfrastructure (OCI) within the Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) beginning Oct. 1. This afternoon, CISE Assistant Director Farnam Jahanian and OCI Office Director Alan Blatecky issued a letter to the science and engineering community describing the realignment (following the link):

With the start of the 2012-13 school year, the National Science Foundation (NSF) yesterday released the first issue of the second volume of CS Bits & Bytes, focusing on biomimetic robotics, relating optimal control to the 2012 Summer Olympics. The issue highlights the work of Emanuel Todorov’s Movement Control Laboratory at the University of Washington, includes links to related videos, and contains a culminating activity that asks students to define performance metrics for sports, helping them realize all that must go into optimal control and performance. CS Bits & Bytes is a biweekly newsletter developed to make computer science more accessible to educators and learners around the world. Each issue of CS […]

Technology writer Steve Lohr had a great piece about the future of computing — and other fields — in The New York Times yesterday: TECHNOLOGY tends to cascade into the marketplace in waves. Think of personal computers in the 1980s, the Internet in the 1990s and smartphones in the last five years.   Computing may be on the cusp of another such wave. This one, many researchers and entrepreneurs say, will be based on smarter machines and software that will automate more tasks and help people make better decisions in business, science and government. And the technological building blocks, both hardware and software, are falling into place, stirring optimism [more following the link…]. […]

The President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) heard this morning from Susan L. Graham (UC Berkeley and the Computing Community Consortium), Peter Lee (Microsoft Research), and David E. Shaw (D.E. Shaw & Co.), co-chairs of a small PCAST working group assessing the status and direction of the nation’s Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) program. The objectives of the working group, which is producing a short update to the comprehensive report on the NITRD program that PCAST issued in December 2010 as required by law, are three-fold: to understand what has transpired in the nearly two years since the last report (both in terms of policy and technological advances), […]

Updated Friday, Sept. 7 at 12:45pm EDT: The National Science Foundation (NSF) has issued a statement this afternoon further describing the realignment plans (emphasis added): The National Science Foundation (NSF) yesterday announced plans to realign four program offices in the Office of the Director to maximize research and education outcomes for science and engineering, while enhancing NSF’s operational agility. The proposed organizational changes include:   The Office of Cyberinfrastructure would become a division within the Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering. The Office of Polar Programs would become a division within the Directorate for Geosciences. The Office of International Science and Engineering would be merged with the Office of Integrative Activities, […]