The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) has announced the creation of the new Raymond and Beverly Sackler Prize in Convergence Research, convergence research is the integration of research in two or more of the following disciplines: mathematics, physics, chemistry, biomedicine, biology, astronomy, earth sciences, engineering, and computational science. The inaugural prize will be awarded for convergence research that benefits human health. The prize is made possible through a generous gift from Raymond and Beverly Sackler and the Raymond and Beverly Sackler Foundation, and will be presented annually beginning this year with an inaugural $400,000 award. Two-thirds of the prize money will be awarded to the selected researcher(s), and the remaining third will […]

The University Consortium for Geographic Information Science (UCGIS) Awards Program identifies and honors members of the geospatial community who have extraordinary records of accomplishments, including service to the mission of UCGIS. This year, the top honor for education goes to Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council member Dr. Shashi Shekhar of the University of Minnesota, for his expansion and strengthening of Geographic Information Science education. From the UCGIS announcement: Shashi Shekhar, the McKnight Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Minnesota, was singled out for our Education Award. Dr. Shekhar has left a mark at every level of GIScience education. In 2003, Dr. Shekhar co-authored a textbook […]

The following is a guest blog post by Alejandro Suarez, AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellow working in the Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate at the National Science Foundation. Last Friday, the National Science Foundation (NSF) Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) announced the Big Data Regional Innovation Hubs program to ignite new partnerships among government, university, and industry around Big Data. The program continues NSF’s leadership in the National Big Data Research and Development Initiative, launched in 2012 to solve some of the Nation’s most pressing R&D challenges related to extracting knowledge and insights from large, complex collections of digital data. This solicitation is […]

The future is bright for 40 young finalists from Intel’s 2015 Science Talent Search, who as high school seniors are already completing and publishing graduate level science projects. The Intel Science Talent Search (Intel STS), a program of the Society for Science & the Public, is the nation’s most prestigious pre-college science competition. Alumni of STS have made extraordinary contributions to science and hold more than 100 of the world’s most distinguished science and math honors, including the Nobel Prize and the National Medal of Science. Each year, 300 Intel STS semifinalists and their schools are recognized. From that select pool of semifinalists, 40 student finalists are invited to Washington, […]

The following is a guest blog post by Ran Libeskind-Hadas, R. Michael Shanahan Professor and Computer Science Department Chair at Harvey Mudd College.  This year, the National Science Foundation (NSF) Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate (CISE) CISE made its first CAREER awards for research in computer science education.  The awardees are  Kristy Boyer, Assistant Professor of Computer Science at North Carolina State University, and Ben Shapiro, Assistant Professor of Engineering Education at Tufts University. Dr. Boyer’s work explores collaborative learning among computer science undergraduates.  Students collaborate through a system that supports text-based natural language dialog, synchronized code ending, and shared repository control.  Her research   uses techniques in machine learning to analyze […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) congratulates Michael Stonebraker from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) on receiving the 2014 ACM Turing Award for fundamental contributions to the concepts and practices underlying modern database systems. From the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) Website: An adjunct professor of computer science and engineering at MIT and a principal investigator at CSAIL, Stonebraker sometimes jokes that he didn’t know what he was researching for more than 30 years. “But then, out of nowhere, some marketing guys started talking about ‘big data,’” he says. “That’s when I realized that I’d been studying this thing for the better part of my academic life.” From the Turing […]