President Obama has issued an Executive Order establishing the National Strategic Computing Initiative (NSCI), which is an effort to create a cohesive, multi-agency strategic vision, and Federal investment strategy in high-performance computing (HPC). HPC systems, through their high levels of computing power and large amounts of storage capacity, are essential to economic competitiveness, scientific discovery, and national security. The NSCI will ensure that the United States continues leading in this field over the coming decades. As the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology has concluded, high-performance computing “must now assume a broader meaning, encompassing not only flops, but also the ability, for example, to efficiently manipulate vast and rapidly increasing […]

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) Big Data to Knowledge initiative (BD2K) has announced the release of an Request for Applications (RFA) for software and methods development in biomedical big data science: “Big Data to Knowledge (BD2K) Development of Software Tools and Methods for Biomedical Big Data in Targeted Areas of High Need (U01)“. This opportunity targets three topic areas of high need for researchers working with biomedical Big Data: Data privacy is one of the fundamental challenges of our age. To take full advantage of the power of big data to drive biomedical discovery, researchers must work with data from disparate sources and with differing privacy policies and protections. How do we integrate […]

The following blog post is from Mark Berman, the GENI Project Director.  Submissions invited by August 24, 2015. Over the next two years, the NSF’s Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI) project will transition from a stage of development and deployment managed by the GENI Project Office (GPO) to a phase of continuing operations and support of research innovations under community governance. During the period from Fall 2015 through Fall 2017, the community – to include academia, industry, and government stakeholders, including NSF – will establish governance, administrative, and operations resources and procedures to meet the following goals: Continue and expand GENI’s success as a platform for research and education; Identify […]

The next WATCH talk, called New Frontiers in Hardware Security and Trust is Thursday, July 16, 2015 from Noon-1pm ET. The presenter is Mark Tehranipoor from the University of Florida. Mark is currently the Intel Charles E. Young Professor in Cybersecurity in the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering. His current research interests include: hardware security and trust, counterfeit electronics detection and prevention, supply chain risk management, and reliable and testable circuit design. Abstract Hardware security domain has received significant attention from researchers in academia, industry, and government due mainly to the globalized design, fabrication, and assembly of integrated circuits and systems. The complexity of today’s electronic components and systems supply chain […]

The Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Research Initiation Initiative (CRII) program is for research and teaching faculty in the first two years of their appointments. In 2014-15, the first year of the program, there were 76 awards under this program.Two of the projects that were funded last year are highlighted below. The interaction between computer processors and software is governed by an Instruction Set Architecture (ISA). The ISA is large and complex, too large for a person to understand and reason about all the interactions between different parts completely. [My] research is about detecting security vulnerabilities that exist in the ISA. The hypothesis of this research is that it […]

The 2015 White House Conference on Aging is Monday, July 13th from 10:00AM- 5:00 PM ET. The White House has held a Conference on Aging each decade since the 1960s to identify and advance actions to improve the quality of life of older Americans. The 2015 White House Conference on Aging is an opportunity to look ahead to the issues that will help shape the landscape for older Americans for the next decade. Some of the common themes that will be present at the conference include the following: Healthy aging will be all the more important as baby boomers age. As medical advances progress, the opportunities for older Americans to […]