President Barack Obama, during his State of the Union address, discussed education and the revolution of industry, bringing it back to America. President Obama also discussed high school curriculum reform to better prepare students for tech jobs; in an effort to create more classes that focus on STEM, he mentioned rewarding schools which partner with higher education institutions and industry to create such classes. President Obama went on to discuss the importance of funding cyber-security research, especially regarding the security of our critical infrastructure. President Obama stated: We know hackers steal people’s identities and infiltrate private e-mail. We know foreign countries and companies swipe our corporate secrets. Now our enemies […]

For the third year, Major League Baseball (MLB) has partnered with Syracuse University’s School of Information Sciences to give students real life experience, and the league new ideas for fan engagement. The annual contest provides students the opportunity to pitch their ideas for real challenges created by the MLB. This year’s challenge was use the trend of “gamification” to create an application, webpage, or other form of technology that MLB.com’s community can use.   “The winning project, presented a way to merge all of the social media documents that a single game might produce — smartphone photos, tweets, Facebook status updates, etc. — into a single interface. The project’s creators, […]

Every year since 2007, The TED Fellows program has recognized young innovators from around the globe for their “insightful, bold ideas that have the potential to influence our world.” Last week, Miriah Meyer, one of our 2009 Computing Innovation Fellows, was selected as one of the 2013 TED Fellows – one of 20 fellows selected out of over 1200 applicants – for her pioneering efforts in interactive visualization: Miriah Meyer (USA) – Science visualization designer American designer who creates interactive visualization systems that help scientists make sense of complex data. Miriah is being given the option to participate in either the TED Conference in Long Beach, CA, or the TEDGlobal in Edinburg, U.K. It’s worth noting that Miriah […]

Last week, the National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded $21.6 million to 34 institutions across the country through the foundation’s Campus Cyberinfrastructure-Network Infrastructure and Engineering (CC-NIE) program. The projects will seek to improve U.S. University and college computer networks that are necessary for movement of the large data sets required for data-intensive scientific research. The awards to the 34 institutions across 23 states support two categories of awards: Network Integration and Applied Innovation awards provide support of up to $1 million for up to two years.  These awards address the challenges of achieving end-user network performance across complex, distributed research and education environments.  They seek to integrate existing and new technologies with applied innovations by […]

Popular Mechanics, the American Magazine which features regular articles on science and technology, released their annual breakthrough awardees earlier this week.  These awards highlight innovations that have the potential to make the world smarter, safer and more efficient. A total of ten awards were announced and at least four of the awardees feature computer science research. Four of these projects are featured below, all awardees are listed on Popular Mechanics’ webpage.   MABEL, Teaching Robots to Walk – Jessy Grizzle, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and Jonathan Hurst, Oregon State University Walking, that fundamental human activity, seems simple: Take one foot, put it in front of the other; repeat. But to […]

Today at a briefing on Capitol Hill titled, “Big Data, Bigger Opportunities“, hosted by Tech America, The National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced $15 million in funding for Big Data research. These awards come nearly six months after the Obama Administration released it’s substantial R&D initiative in March of this year. The initiative committed more than $200 million in new funding through six agencies and departments to improve the nation’s  “ability to extract knowledge and insights from large and complex collections of digital data.” Subra Suresh, Director of the National Science Foundation: “I am delighted to provide such a positive progress report just six months after fellow […]