The Department of Education’s (ED) Office of Educational Technology today released a draft issue brief — Enhancing Teaching and Learning Through Educational Data Mining and Learning Analytics — representing the results of a months-long discourse among 8 academic and 15 industrial data mining and learning analytics experts conducted by SRI International. The brief, inspired by ED’s 2010 National Educational Technology Plan (NETP), articulates the challenges and opportunities of Big Data in improving student outcomes and overall productivity of K-2 education systems. It focuses on three key research areas — educational data mining, learning analytics, and visual data analytics — and offers a set of corresponding recommendations, categorized by various stakeholders. ED is now […]

Yesterday, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) announced that it will convene a Grand Challenges conference this summer, highlighting the “progress the Administration has made on existing Grand Challenge initiatives” and recognizing “new commitments and actions by Federal agencies, companies, philanthropists, universities, and non-profits to set and meet Grand Challenges.” To aid with the Administration’s quest, today the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is calling on the computing research community to submit ideas for Grand Challenge topics. In a blog post yesterday, OSTP Deputy Director for Policy Tom Kalil and Assistant Director for Grand Challenges Cristin Dorgelo wrote:

Word surfaced last week of a new Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Grand Challenge, expected to be issued shortly. First reported by Hizook and later confirmed by Wired, the new Grand Challenge calls for “a humanoid robot (with a bias toward bipedal designs) that can be used in rough terrain and for industrial disasters.” According to the Wired report: Brace yourself, because that era might be here sooner than you think: The Pentagon agency behind some of the most important robotics research will soon challenge experts worldwide to come up with humanoid robots that can navigate their environment and handle tools with near-Homo sapiens skill.  

Later today, the Department of Energy (DoE) — together with Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E), Itron, and Gridwise Alliance — will launch the Apps for Energy competition, “challenging developers to use the Green Button data access program to bring residential and commercial utility data to life.” Through the competition, DoE will offer $100,000 in cash prizes to the software developers and designers who submit the best apps, as judged by a panel of government officials, energy industry leaders, and information technology experts (more after the jump).

NPR’s Diane Rehm Show on Monday featured an hour-long discussion among several thought leaders — titled “The New World of Massive Data Mining” — about the Federal government’s new Big Data R&D Initiative: Every time you go on the Internet, make a phone call, send an email, pass a traffic camera or pay a bill, you create [electronic data]. In all, 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created each day. This massive pile of information from all sources is called “Big Data.” It gets stored somewhere, and everyday the pile gets bigger. Government and industry are finding new ways to analyze it. Last week the administration announced an initiative to aid the development of Big Data […]

The National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) today announced four new Expeditions in Computing awards, providing each selected project team up to $10 million in funding over five years to pursue “ambitious fundamental research” that will shape “the future of computing and information technologies for decades to come.” Established in 2008, Expeditions from “the centerpiece of the directorate’s award portfolio”; they represent the single largest investments made by the directorate in basic computing research. The four awards announced today “contribute to the program’s rich intellectual portfolio,” according to NSF, “by adding two projects in robotics and smart systems, one project focused on new […]