The National Science Foundation (NSF) has announced giving $10 million in awards to 10 “Big Data Spokes” projects in order to facilitate research on topics identified by the four Big Data Regional Innovation Hubs (BD Hubs). The BD Hubs, started by NSF last year, attempt to address regional specific needs for big data. For instance the Midwest Hub includes a focus on agriculture, while the South Hub includes coastal hazards. The Spokes cover a range of topics, including agriculture, data sharing, healthcare, and big data for environmental uses. “The BD Spokes advance the goals and regional priorities of each BD Hub, fusing the strengths of a range of institutions and […]

The Open Source Application Development Portal (OSADP) is a web-based portal that provides access to and supports the collaboration, development, and use of open-source ITS-related applications. The OSADP has added a number of new ITS-related applications that are available free to the public. The following new applications are now available for download: Dynamic Intermodal Routing Environment for Control and Telematics – Analysis, Modeling and Simulation (DIRECTView-AMS) is a visualization application designed to visualize the performance measures generated during simulations using DIRECT software with options to turn on and off scenarios. This tool can be used for evaluating dynamic mobility applications and active transportation and demand management strategies, applications, and concepts. Intelligent […]

The Global City Teams Challenge (GCTC), a collaborative platform uniting local governments, nonprofits, academia, and industry working on Internet of Things (IoT) applications within a smart city, has announced the next phase of GCTC collaboration, the GCTC SuperClusters! The GCTC, convened by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and US Ignite, consists of project teams or “Action Clusters” working towards Smart City IoT innovations. The SuperClusters will combine multiple, existing GCTC Action Clusters into singular teams to pursue common objectives. The SuperClusters will likely be based around the areas of: Emergency Preparedness, Disaster Recovery, and Resilience Energy, Utilities, Water, and Microgrids Environment and Healthcare Municipal Dashboards Transportation To […]

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is offering up to $40,000 to two communities as part of their Smart City Air Challenge in order to help the communities create and implement plans to deploy air quality sensors and share the subsequent data. To qualify, communities will need to submit their plans detailing how they will deploy hundreds of air quality sensors and how they will manage the data they collect. The award money will not cover the entire program costs – communities will need to partner with sensor manufactures, data management companies, and other necessary industry partners in order to fully realize their plans. After a year the EPA will evaluate […]

This is a guest blog post by Greg Hager, Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Past Chair and Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University, with contributions from Eric Horvitz the Technical Fellow & Managing Director at Microsoft Research and a past president of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). In a recent blog post, we summarized the report of an academic/industry roundtable, which, among other recommendations, advocated for mechanisms to support long-term, strategic, and sustained conversation between academics and industry representatives. Yesterday, one such mechanism came into being with the announcement of the Partnership on AI by a consortium consisting of Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Facebook, and IBM. From the press release: The objective of […]

As part of the White House’s expansion of the Smart Cities Initiative, the National Science Foundation (NSF) has announced a new program solicitation on Smart and Connected Communities. The following Dear Colleague Letter from Jim Kurose, Assistant Director of NSF for Computer and Information Science and Engineering, explains the new opportunities available. Dear Colleagues,   Yesterday, the White House announced that the federal government is committing over $80 million – led by NSF with a $60M commitment over two years – toward the Smart Cities Initiative that was launched just over a year ago.   NSF has long supported the fundamental research, education, and community-building activities that are catalyzing the multidisciplinary and […]