A reminder that proposals responsive to the Computing Community Consortium’s (CCC) call for workshop programs that will define visions and agendas for exciting frontiers of computing research are due by 5pm EDT next Friday, Oct. 14th. From the official solicitation: Successful [workshop] programs will ultimately articulate and mobilize community support for a research vision(s), with the intention of generating support from funding agencies. Proposals are encouraged across the full spectrum of work in the creation and application of information technologies to important challenges, from the theoretical to the practical. Awards can range from $10,000 to $200,000. (Proposers are encouraged to ask for an amount commensurate with activities outlined in their […]

Lots of buzz this week about “Big Data,” and particularly the opportunities for government in this space. Our friend and colleague, Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) President Rob Atkinson, has written a great blog post over on the Innovation Policy Blog arguing for the utility of “Big Data”/analytics in the public sector: Recently more attention has been drawn to the emergence of “Big Data” — large scale data sets that businesses and government are using to unlock new value using today’s computing and communications power. As a McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) study recently showed, Big Data offers a wide range of commercial opportunities in virtually every sector of the economy for the United States. […]

(This post has been updated; please scroll down to see the latest.) At 11am EDT today, National Science Foundation (NSF) Director Subra Suresh — joined by numerous U.S. and international researchers, government officials, and National Academy of Sciences President Ralph Cicerone — will launch Science Across Virtual Institutes (SAVI), “an effort to facilitate collaboration among scientists, engineers and educators across the globe to better leverage taxpayer resources to spur innovation, enable discovery and help solve society’s most vexing problems.” According to the official NSF press release: Building on beneficial partnerships initiated by NSF-supported researchers, research institutes and universities, SAVI projects will address common challenges and serve as creative hubs for […]

Late last month, NASA announced that it plans to run an International Space Apps Challenge in 2012, bringing together officials from international space agencies, scientists, and citizens in an effort to use publicly-released scientific data to create, build, and invent new solutions that address challenges of global importance, from the impact of weather upon the global economy to the depletion of ocean resources. According to the Challenge website:

This is a special contribution to this blog by Fred Roberts, director of the Center for Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science (DIMACS), and Stephen Greenfield, Professor of Mathematics and a member of the Graduate Faculty, at Rutgers. The pair organized a workshop entitled “U.S.-China Collaborations in Computer Science and Sustainability,” bringing together 45 U.S. and Chinese computer scientists, mathematicians, ecologists, and representatives from other disciplines for a two-day meeting Sept. 19-20 in Piscataway, NJ. The full program, including list of participants and talks, can be found here. In this post, Fred and Stephen summarize the workshop, including key findings. The Sept. 19-20 workshop at Rutgers followed a series of U.S.-China Computer Science Leadership Summits featuring leaders of […]

For the past two weeks, the National Mall in Washington, DC, has been transformed into a neighborhood of futuristic homes, with 20 teams from five countries spanning four continents competing in the U.S. Department of Energy’s annual Solar Decathlon — an award-winning program that challenges collegiate students from around the world “to design, build, and operate solar-powered houses that are affordable, highly energy efficient, attractive, and easy to live in.” Late Saturday, Energy Secretary Steven Chu announced the winners — and the team from the University of Maryland took home first place, scoring 951.151 points out of a possible 1,000. The Maryland team’s home — called WaterShed — harvests, recycles, and reuses water, conserving and producing resources with the water […]