Earlier this afternoon, the National Science Foundation (NSF) held an informational webinar about its new multi-disciplinary Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace (SaTC) program. Replacing NSF’s Trustworthy Computing (TwC) program this year, SaTC expands cybersecurity research support within the Foundation beyond the Computer & Information Science & Engineering (CISE) Directorate for the first time, to include the directorates for Social, Behavioral, & Economic Sciences (SBE) and Mathematical and Physical Sciences (MPS) as well as the Office of Cyberinfrastructure (OCI). In the webinar, NSF officials highlighted the goals and driving principles underlying the SaTC solicitation and offered deep dives into each of three “perspectives.” They also noted that any proposer should clearly delineate his or her problem statement and specify the relevance of his or her proposed work to the […]

(This post has been updated; please scroll down for the latest.) MIT’s Technology Review has an in-depth interview with Peter Norvig, Google’s Director of Research, and Eric Horvitz, a Distinguished Scientist at Microsoft Research (and a member of the CCC Council), about their optimism for the future of AI: Google and Microsoft don’t share a stage often, being increasingly fierce competitors in areas such as Web search, mobile, and cloud computing. But the rivals can agree on some things — like the importance of artificial intelligence to the future of technology.   [Norvig and Horvitz] recently spoke jointly to an audience at the Computer History Museum in Palo Alto, California, about the promise […]

Among the 10 world-changing ideas we featured earlier today is the “forever health monitor,” i.e., the ability to exploit today’s technology to quickly, easily, and fairly inexpensively monitor our own vital signs in real time, so that we may pinpoint the first signs of trouble as they arise. It turns out one man — Internet pioneer and founding director of California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (CalIT2) Larry Smarr — has been doing exactly that for the past 10 years. And for all his personal health instrumentation efforts, Xconomy has named Larry its Xconomist of the Week: In the 10 years since he moved to San Diego to become founding director of the [University of California] system’s [CalIT2], […]

In the December 2011 issue of Scientific American: Revolutions often spring from the simplest of ideas. When a young inventor named Steve Jobs wanted to provide computing power to “people who have no computer experience and don’t particularly care to gain any,” he ushered us from the cumbersome technology of mainframes and command-line prompts to the breezy advances of the Macintosh and iPhone. His idea helped to forever change our relationship with technology.   What other simple but revolutionary ideas are out there in the labs, waiting for the right moment to make it big? We have found 10, and … we explain what they are and how they might shake things […]

Last month, the National Science Foundation (NSF) launched a new multi-disciplinary program — Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace (SaTC) — seeking proposals that address cybersecurity needs. SaTC replaces NSF’s Trustworthy Computing (TwC) program, expanding support within the Foundation to include, in addition to the Directorate for Computer & Information Science & Engineering (CISE), the directorates for Social, Behavioral, & Economic Sciences (SBE) and Mathematical and Physical Sciences (MPS) and Office of Cyberinfrastructure (OCI). Late yesterday, in an effort to help researchers interested in cybersecurity understand the opportunities being made available through SaTC, NSF announced that it will hold a webinar about the new program on Friday, December 2, 2011, at 1pm EST. From the official solicitation: […]

Computing in Science and Engineering is out with a special issue for November/December 2011 focused on Big Data — and the significant research opportunities emerging from a growing wealth of scientific data. As guest editors Francis Alexander (Los Alamos National Laboratory), Adolfy Hoisie (Pacific Northwest National Laboratory), and Alexander Szalay (Johns Hopkins University) write in their introduction: With the exponential growth in data acquisition and generation — whether by next-generation telescopes, high-throughput experiments, petascale scientific computing, or high-resolution sensors — it’s an extremely exciting time for scientific discovery. As a result of these technological advances, the next decade will see even more significant impacts in fields such as medicine, astronomy and […]