On Wednesday, August 9, 2017 from 12:00 PM to 1:00 PM ET, the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute (VTTI) will host the first webinar in a series of two that explores ways to use the second Strategic Highway Research Program (SHRP 2) safety data. The SHRP 2 safety data was a three-year data-collection effort that produced continuous driving data for over 3,000 drivers, including thousands of safety critical events and a large sample of baseline driving events. The webinar “Video Reduction and Analysis Methods: Part I, Manual Reduction” will offer an overview of manual video reduction techniques. Attendees will learn which approach or combination of approaches might be best for their research project. The first webinar will be […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Convergence of Data and Computing Task Force responded to the National Science Foundation (NSF) Dear Colleague Letter: Request for Information on Future Needs for Advanced Cyberinfrastructure to Support Science and Engineering Research (NSF CI 2030) in April 2017. You can see their response here. Recently, the NSF released all the responses to NSF CI 2030 RFI. This response led to the CCC’s Advanced Cyberinfrastructure for Science, Engineering, and Public Policy white paper. From the white paper: Progress in many domains increasingly benefits from our ability to view the systems through a computational lens. These advances would not be possible without the advanced data and computational cyberinfrastructure and tools for […]

The following Great Innovative Idea is from Jun Zhang and Michael Yip. Their paper called Three-Dimensional Hysteresis Modeling of Robotic Artificial Muscles with Application to Shape Memory Alloy Actuators was one of the featured talks at the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) sponsored Material Robotics (MaRo) Workshop at the 2017 Robotics Science and Systems (RSS) Conference. The Idea Robotic artificial muscles are actuators that can make robots move. Unlike electric motors, robotic artificial muscles are compliant and can generate straight contractions just like our biological muscles. Recently, they are increasingly popular in many exciting areas, such as biomimetic robots, soft robots, and safe human-robot interaction. To practically use robotic artificial muscles, it is crucial to have an accurate model […]

The Amazon Research Awards (ARA) program has opened a call for proposals for the 2017 round of awards in a number of areas including computer vision, general AI, knowledge management and data quality, machine learning, machine translation, and natural language understanding. For the full list of topics, please see this website. The program is open to faculty members in North America and Europe and awards up to $80,000 in cash and $20,000 AWS promotional credits. Submission Requirements Project proposals should be a maximum of 4 pages (single column, minimum 10 pt font), plus 1 page for references, plus CV. All content components (proposal, references, CV) should be composed into a single PDF file. […]

Three divisions at the National Science Foundation (NSF) Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) have just released new solicitations for their core programs. Computing and Communication Foundation (CCF)  CCF supports the following three core programs: Algorithmic Foundations (AF) Communications and Information Foundations (CIF) Software and Hardware Foundations (SHF) Proposals submitted to this solicitation must be consistent with one of two project classes defined below: Small Projects Total budgets up to $500,000 for durations of up to three years Submission window- November 01, 2017 – November 15, 2017 Medium Projects Total budgets up to $500,001 to $1,200,000 for durations up to four years Submission window- September 20, 2017 – September 27, 2017 Information and Intelligent Systems (IIS) […]

National Science Foundation (NSF) Assistant Director for the Directorate of Computer & Information Science & Engineering (CISE) James Kurose has issued the following letter to the community for pursuing meaningful actions in support of Broadening Participation in Computing (BPC). Dear Colleague: The National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) is committed to broadening the participation of underrepresented populations in computing and closely-related disciplines. Indeed, CISE supports meaningful actions that address the longstanding underrepresentation of various populations including women, minorities (African Americans/Blacks, Hispanic Americans, American Indians, Alaska Natives, Native Hawaiians, Native Pacific Islanders, and persons from economically disadvantaged backgrounds), and persons with disabilities, in the computing field. With this Dear […]