Last week, the National Institutes of Health announced a call for the 2012 Director’s New Innovator (DP2) Award program, an initiative created in 2007 to stimulate highly innovative research and support promising new investigators. Many new investigators have exceptionally innovative research ideas, but not the preliminary data required to fare well in the traditional NIH peer review system. As part of NIH’s commitment to increasing opportunities for new scientists, it has created the NIH Director’s New Innovator Award to support exceptionally creative new investigators who propose highly innovative projects that have the potential for unusually high impact. This award complements ongoing efforts by NIH and its institutes and centers to fund new […]

Leslie Valiant, the winner of the 2010 A.M. Turing Award for his “transformative contributions to the theory of computation,” delivered the Turing Lecture at the 2011 Federated Computing Research Conference, held in San Jose, CA, in early June. Valiant’s lecture — titled “The Extent and the Limitations of Mechanistic Explanations of Nature” — is now online (after the jump):

(This post has been updated.) David Ferrucci, the lead researcher for IBM’s Watson, was recently selected by Slate Magazine as one of “five American technology gurus” — for being “both wildly inventive and incredibly practical.” Here’s the official writeup. As part of the honor, Ferrucci was interviewed by Slate’s Farhad Manjoo. Among the questions: Do you have a “Holy Grail” that you’re working toward?   The Holy Grail for me is that you’ll get intelligent dialogue with a machine, like on Star Trek. My minigoal toward that is a computer that will help in reading comprehension. Imagine: A third-grade or high-school student will sit down with the computer, and the student […]

Every year at this time, Microsoft Research recognizes outstanding new faculty members — nominated by their universities as the best and brightest in their fields. This year’s class of Faculty Fellows — with interests spanning economics and game theory, bioelectronics, sustainability, healthcare, computer vision, computer security, etc. — was announced moments ago at the annual MSR Faculty Summit here in Redmond: Maria Florina Balcan Georgia Institute of Technology Assistant Professor School of Computer Science   Maria Florina Balcan is an assistant professor in the School of Computer Science at Georgia Institute of Technology. She received her PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University under the supervision of Avrim Blum. From October 2008 until […]

Frans Kaashoek, a Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (and a current member of the CCC Council), has been selected as the 2010 recipient of the ACM-Infosys Foundation Award in the Computing Sciences. Frans was chosen for his landmark contributions to the structuring, robustness, scalability, and security of software systems, enabling efficient, mobile, and highly distributed applications and setting important research directions. The ACM-Infosys Foundation Award in the Computing Sciences recognizes personal contributions by young scientists and system developers to a contemporary innovation that, through its depth, fundamental impact and broad implications, exemplifies the greatest achievements in the discipline.  The award […]

Professor Maja J. Matarić, a computer scientist at USC’s Viterbi School of Engineering, has been awarded the the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics, and Engineering Mentoring (PAESMEM). Professor Mataric was recognized for her outstanding efforts in mentoring at all levels — K-12 students, students at USC, and young faculty colleagues. It is exciting to see mentoring acknowledged and rewarded at this level! Congratulations Maja! Read the White House announcement here.