The National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) issued a new National Strategic Plan for Advanced Manufacturing on Wednesday, documenting “the fundamental importance of advanced manufacturing” to the nation’s competitiveness and security and setting forth key objectives and priorities for Federal policy in this space. Among the objectives: Accelerating investment, especially by small- and medium-sized manufacturers; Making the education and training system more responsive to the demand for skills; Optimizing Federal advanced manufacturing R&D investments by taking a portfolio perspective; Increasing total public and private investments in advanced manufacturing R&D; and Fostering national and regional partnerships among all stakeholders in advanced manufacturing. Of particular interest are four categories of investments that “help to position […]

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has released a vision and strategic plan for Advanced Computing Infrastructure (ACI) seeking “to position and support the entire spectrum of NSF-funded communities at the cutting edge of advanced computing technologies, hardware, and software.” The report “also aims to promote a more complementary, comprehensive, and balanced portfolio of advanced computing infrastructure and programs for research and education to support multidisciplinary computational and data-enabled science and engineering that in turn support the entire scientific, engineering, and education community.” ACI is a key component of the Foundation’s Cyberinfrastructure for 21st Century Science and Engineering (CIF21) framework. Here’s the vision articulated in the report: NSF will be a leader in creating and deploying a comprehensive portfolio […]

Today’s issue of Nature is dedicated to Alan Turing — and the Turing Centenary: Alan Turing, born a century ago this year, is best known for his wartime code-breaking and for inventing the ‘Turing machine’ — the concept at the heart of every computer today. But his legacy extends much further: he founded the field of artificial intelligence, proposed a theory of biological pattern formation and speculated about the limits of computation in physics. In this collection of features and opinion pieces, Nature celebrates the mind that, in a handful of papers over a tragically short lifetime, shaped many of the hottest fields in science today. As the journal’s editorial board writes in […]

For the second year in a row, a number of public and private partners have joined forces to co-sponsor the National STEM Video Game Challenge, which seeks to advance science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) learning through game development and design among youth and educators. This year’s Challenge has been launched in partnership with the Department of Education’s Digital Promise initiative, which is unlocking “the promise of breakthrough technologies to transform teaching and learning.” There are four categories of entry for the Challenge (following the link):

Early last Saturday morning, I had the privilege and pleasure of organizing and moderating a symposium at the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s (AAAS) 2012 Annual Meeting in Vancouver. The 90-minute session — titled Data to Knowledge to Action: Computational Science in a Global Knowledge Society — sought to describe how advances in computing research are enabling a “data to knowledge to action” pipeline that is increasingly critical for facilitating a 21st-century global knowledge society. Over 70 people packed into a small room in the Vancouver Convention Center to hear the session’s featured speakers, Eric Horvitz, Peter Stone, and Deborah Estrin (slide shows after the jump).

Last week, the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Emerging Technologies released a consensus list — the result of input from “some of the world’s leading minds within the entire [Global Agenda Council] network” — of “the top 10 emerging technologies for 2012.” These are the technologies that have the greatest potential to create new industries and impact new ones by providing solutions to global challenges. Atop the list — which is ordered starting with the technology with the greatest potential — is “informatics for adding value to information”: The quantity of information now available to individuals and organizations is unprecedented in human history, and the rate of information generation […]