Contributions to the post were provided by Yair Rotstein, head of the US-Israel Binational Science Foundation (BSF). The US National Science Foundation (NSF) and the US-Israel Binational Science Foundation (BSF) signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) on Research Cooperation, which provides an overarching framework to encourage collaboration between US and Israeli research communities and sets out the principles by which jointly supported activities might be developed. The MOU provides for an international collaboration arrangement whereby US researchers may receive funding from the NSF and Israeli researchers may receive funding from the BSF. This is part of a larger program; see the NSF Dear Colleague Letter from last summer here. The goal of […]

Recently, the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) posted about the USDA/NIFA Food and Agriculture Cyber-infrastructure and Tools (FACT) initiative.  Check out this webinar about FACT on Wednesday, June 27th at 2PM ET.  FACT seeks to catalyze activities that harness big data for synthesizing new knowledge, making predictive decisions, and fostering data-supported innovation in agriculture. Projects funded through FACT will work to examine the value of data for small and large farmers, agricultural and food industries, and gain an understanding of how data can impact the agricultural supply chain, reduce food waste and loss, improve consumer health, environmental and natural resource management, affect the structure of U.S. food and agriculture sectors, and increase U.S. competitiveness. The webinar will […]

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) recently released the following letter to the community announcing its Strategic Plan for Data Science.  Dear Colleagues, The National Institutes of Health (NIH) released its first-ever Strategic Plan for Data Science to capitalize on the opportunities presented by advances in data science.  The plan describes NIH’s overarching goals, strategic objectives, and implementation tactics for promoting the modernization of the NIH-funded biomedical data science ecosystem. We are grateful for the input from the community and the public received from the Request for Information, which was incorporated into the final plan. Over the course of the next year, NIH will begin implementing its strategy, with some elements of the […]

Sam Bowman from New York University provided contributions to this post. The 16th Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (NAACL HLT 2018) was held in New Orleans, June 1 to June 6, 2018. The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) sponsored the 2018 NAACL Student Research Workshop (SRW) in conjunction with NAACL HLT 2018. The SRW gave student researchers in natural language processing (NLP) the opportunity to present their work and receive constructive feedback and mentorship by experienced members of the ACL community. Twenty student participants from nine countries presented original research projects and thesis proposals as both talks and posters during […]

The following is a letter to the community from Erwin Gianchandani, Acting Assistant Director, of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Directorate of Computer & Information Science & Engineering (CISE).  Dear CISE Community, The NSF Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) is delighted to announce the appointment of Dr. Rance Cleaveland as the Division Director for the Division of Computing and Communication Foundations (CCF), effective July 9, 2018. Rance will be joining NSF/CISE from the University of Maryland at College Park (UMD), where he is currently Professor of Computer Science and was the Executive and Scientific Director of the Fraunhofer USA Center for Experimental and Software Engineering until 2014. Prior to joining the […]

Former CCC Council member and current CRA Board member Shashi Shekhar from the University of Minnesota provided contributions to this post. The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) Agriculture and Food Research Initiative’s Food and Agriculture Cyberinformatics and Tools (FACT) initiative has issued a call for proposals that 1) focus on fundamental or core big data analytics and tool development, and/or 2) apply big data concepts to specific science domains or across domains and sectors for any of the Plant health and production and plant products program area priorities. A snippet from the USDA/NIFA Request for Applications (RFA): This program area priority focuses […]