Data and computing were front and center at today’s meeting of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) in Washington, DC, with U.S. Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Todd Park summarizing the Administration’s rollout this week of a “digital roadmap” seeking to take advantage of existing government data repositories — and David Ferrucci, head of IBM’s Watson project, and Anthony Levandowski, product manager for Google’s self-driving car technology, delivering talks about the fundamental advances being enabled by their teams’ work (more following the link).

Last fall, the Department of Defense (DoD) issued a Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) for its Defense University Research Instrumentation Program (DURIP), which “augments current university capabilities or develops new university capabilities to perform cutting-edge defense research.” At the time, the BAA specifically encouraged proposals “for instrumentation supporting research in robotics.” Today, the DoD is announcing the results of the competition — $54.7 million in awards to purchase state-of-the-art research equipment — and at least a dozen of these awards involve robotics research. According to the DoD press release (following the link):

The organizers for this year’s second KDD workshop on Data Mining Applications in Sustainability (SustKDD 2012) have issued a call for papers. The workshop seeks to bring together researchers working on applications of Knowledge Discovery and Data-mining (KDD) to sustainability in diverse areas, especially in infrastructures such as IT, Smart Grids, water, and transportation. From the call for papers (following the link):

For those who missed last Tuesday’s webinar about the Core Techniques and Technologies for Advancing Big Data Science and Engineering (BIGDATA) program — the centerpiece of the Administration’s $200 million Big Data R&D Initiative — the National Science Foundation (NSF) and National Institutes of Health (NIH) today announced that they will hold a second webinar next Monday, May 21st at 11am EDT. Registration for the May 21st webinar (click here) will remain open until 11:59pm PDT on Sunday, May 20th. Questions about the solicitation may be e-mailed to bigdata@nsf.gov before or during the webinar. As we’ve reported before, the BIGDATA solicitation aims (following the link):

(This post has been updated; please scroll down for the latest.) Scott Aaronson and Robert Wood, the joint recipients of the 2012 Alan T. Waterman Award, visited the National Science Foundation (NSF) last week. In addition to presenting to the National Science Board (NSB) and chatting with NSF staff, they spent some time describing their research projects and experiences to local high school students, as part of an effort to engage and inspire students’ interest in computer science. Wood visited with about 100 students at Yorktown High School in Arlington, VA, while Aaronson spoke to about 150 students at the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (“TJ”) in Alexandria, VA. At Yorktown, Wood […]

Earlier this afternoon, the National Science Foundation (NSF) and National Institutes of Health (NIH) held a joint webinar addressing the Core Techniques and Technologies for Advancing Big Data Science and Engineering (BIGDATA) solicitation announced in late March — the cornerstone of the Federal government’s $200 million Big Data R&D Initiative (more after the jump).