Updated Thursday, March 29, at 10:55am: OSTP and the agencies have announced the Big Data R&D Initiative. See the latest details here. *** As we noted on Tuesday, the Obama Administration is announcing a new, multi-agency Big Data R&D Initiative today. An event — to be streamed live via the web — is scheduled for 2pm EDT. New York Times’ technology writer Steve Lohr has the early details in today’s paper: The federal government is beginning a major research initiative in big data computing. The effort, which will be announced on Thursday, involves several government agencies and departments, and commitments for the programs total $200 million.   Administration officials compare the initiative to past government research […]

Today, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), together with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), TopCoder, Inc., and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Space Systems Laboratory, is launching the Zero Robotics Autonomous Space Capture Challenge, asking individuals and teams of programmers to develop a fuel-optimal control algorithm that enables a satellite on board the International Space Station (ISS) to accomplish a feat that’s very difficult to do autonomously: to capture a space object that’s tumbling, spinning, or moving in the opposite direction. The absence of gravity presents a significant challenge for precision robotic maneuvering and operations in space. Overcoming some of that challenge may be possible through the development […]

Updated Thursday, March 29, at 10:55am: OSTP and the agencies have announced the Big Data R&D Initiative. See the latest details here. *** The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), together with the National Science Foundation (NSF), National Institutes of Health (NIH), U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), Department of Energy (DoE) Office of Science, and Department of Defense (DoD), including the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, will hold an event in Washington, DC, this Thursday addressing the challenges and opportunities relating to “Big Data.” The event will be webcast live from 2:00pm to 3:30pm EDT. According to the media advisory: Researchers in a growing number of fields are generating extremely large and complicated data sets […]

Today’s National Science Foundation (NSF) Science Nation features the work of Amy McGovern, an Associate Professor of Computer Science and Adjunct Associate Professor of Meteorology at the University of Oklahoma, whose data mining and predictive modeling approaches are transforming the way we predict tornadoes. According to the article: Tornadoes claim hundreds of lives and cause billions of dollars in damages in the United States. But the tornado outbreak across the South on April 27, 2011, was startling, even for veteran forecasters such as Greg Carbin at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Storm Prediction Center (SPC) in Norman, Okla.   “Through the 24-hour loop here, almost 200 tornadoes had occurred in […]

We’ve previously described in this space the Materials Genome Initiative (MGI) — a $100 million initiative announced last June to drastically accelerate the discovery, development, and manufacturing of new and advanced materials — describing the critical role to be played by the computer and information sciences and engineering research community, including via predictive modeling, simulation, and visualization capabilities. Now there’s an interesting news focus (subscription required) in this week’s Science, noting, “Supercomputing power now makes it possible to compute the properties of thousands of crystalline materials in a flash and is expected to guide experimentalists where to search for the next best things.” According to the article (following the link):

The computing research community lost a wonderful researcher, colleague, and friend last week. David L. Waltz, whose extraordinary contributions and service to the field included a term as member of the CCC Council during the founding years, passed away on Thursday. The New York Times‘s John Markoff has written an excellent tribute: David L. Waltz, a computer scientist whose early research in information retrieval provided the foundation for today’s Internet search engines, died on Thursday in Princeton, N.J. He was 68.   The cause was brain cancer, his wife, Bonnie Waltz, said. He died at the University Medical Center at Princeton.   During his career as a teacher and a technologist at […]