As we’ve previously blogged, Mozilla and the National Science Foundation (NSF) have teamed up for a challenge, called “Mozilla Ignite“, which focuses on the development of apps for faster, smarter internet of the future. Apps were designed to address needs in advanced manufacturing, education and workforce technologies, emergency preparedness and public safety, healthcare technologies and clean energy and transportation. The brainstorming round completed on August 23rd which brought in over 300 ideas from the community. Mozilla announced a total of eight winners, with one grand prize award. The grand prize winner from the brainstorming round went to Jeremy Cooperstock, director of the Shared Reality Lab at McGill University in Canada. Here […]

Today, the National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded $50 million for research projects designed to help build a secure cyber society and protect the US infrastructure. The awards come from the Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace Program (SaTC), which “builds on [NSF’s] long-term support for a wide range of cutting edge interdisciplinary research and education activities to secure critical infrastructure that is vulnerable to a wide range of threats that challenge its security.” The funded projects include two frontier awards — The first award, titled “Beyond Technical Security: Developing an Empirical Basis for Socio-Economic Perspectives“, is a multi-institution collaboration between Stefan Savage, University of California, San Diego, Vern Paxson, International Computer Science […]

Vipin Kumar, the William Norris Professor and head of computer science and engineering at the University of Minnesota, will receive the Association for Computing Machinery’s (ACM) Special Interest Group on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (SIGKDD) 2012 Innovation Award at the opening plenary of the 18th international ACM SIGKDD Conference next Sunday in Beijing, China. Since 2000, the annual award has been “conferred on one individual or one group of collaborators whose outstanding technical innovations in the KDD field have had a lasting impact on advancing the theory and practice of the field.” According to SIGKDD, the citation for Vipin’s award reads as follows (after the jump):

Judea Pearl received the 2011 ACM A. M. Turing Award “for fundamental contributions to artificial intelligence through the development of a calculus for probabilistic and causal reasoning.” In this guest post, Douglas Fisher, associate professor of computer science and computer engineering at Vanderbilt, summarizes Pearl’s Turing Award Lecture, delivered at last week’s AAAI Conference. Professor Pearl delivered his Turing Award Lecture as the opening invited address at the 26th AAAI Conference in Toronto, Canada, last week. He opened by acknowledging the support of the AAAI community in a great collaborative enterprise, a remarkable “journey” as he said, and he shared the award with the community and his coauthors. He also cited […]

(This post has been updated; please scroll down for the latest.) This afternoon, the White House named 96 researchers — including a 2009 Computing Innovation Fellow (CIFellow) — as recipients of the 2012 Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), “the highest honor bestowed by the United States Government on science and engineering professionals in the early stages of their independent research careers.” Established in 1996 and coordinated by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), the awards honor individuals “for their pursuit of innovative research at the frontiers of science and technology and their commitment to community service as demonstrated through scientific leadership, public education, or community outreach.” Among this […]

The Association for Computing Machinery’s (ACM) Special Interest Groups on Algorithms and Computation Theory (SIGACT) and Operating Systems (SIGOPS), together with the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science (EATCS), today honored Maurice Herlihy, J. Eliot B. Moss, Nir Shavit, and Dan Touitou with the 2012 Edsger W. Dijkstra Prize, recognizing them for their work on transactional memory in the mid-1990s that transformed parallel computing. The four received the award at the 2012 ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC 2012) in Madeira, Portugal, this morning. According to ACM’s press release (following the link):