Last month, the President announced plans to develop a National Bioeconomy Blueprint, describing government-wide steps “to harness biological research innovations to address national challenges in health, food, energy, and the environment.” And earlier this month, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) issued a Request for Information (RFI), seeking input on how best to develop such a blueprint, including: strategies to meet grand challenges in lean budget times; commercialization and entrepreneurship opportunities to open new markets; research and development investments in areas that will provide the foundation for the bioeconomy; enhancements of workforce training to prepare the next generation of scientists and engineers for the bioeconomy jobs of the […]

(This entry has been updated. Please scroll down for the latest.) Earlier this afternoon, the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) held the first of two webinars to provide an overview of the various Science, Engineering, and Education for Sustainability (SEES) solicitations in FY 2012 — with a particular focus on the details of interest to the CISE research community. Joined by CISE Deputy Assistant Director Cynthia Dion-Schwarz and Computing and Communications Foundations (CCF) Division Director Susanne Hambrusch, Program Director Krishna Kant noted that “sustainability questions present new and exciting opportunities for CISE research that can at the same time have significant societal impact.” Kant and […]

A reminder that proposals responsive to the Computing Community Consortium’s (CCC) call for workshop programs that will define visions and agendas for exciting frontiers of computing research are due by 5pm EDT next Friday, Oct. 14th. From the official solicitation: Successful [workshop] programs will ultimately articulate and mobilize community support for a research vision(s), with the intention of generating support from funding agencies. Proposals are encouraged across the full spectrum of work in the creation and application of information technologies to important challenges, from the theoretical to the practical. Awards can range from $10,000 to $200,000. (Proposers are encouraged to ask for an amount commensurate with activities outlined in their […]

Lots of buzz this week about “Big Data,” and particularly the opportunities for government in this space. Our friend and colleague, Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) President Rob Atkinson, has written a great blog post over on the Innovation Policy Blog arguing for the utility of “Big Data”/analytics in the public sector: Recently more attention has been drawn to the emergence of “Big Data” — large scale data sets that businesses and government are using to unlock new value using today’s computing and communications power. As a McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) study recently showed, Big Data offers a wide range of commercial opportunities in virtually every sector of the economy for the United States. […]

Late last month, NASA announced that it plans to run an International Space Apps Challenge in 2012, bringing together officials from international space agencies, scientists, and citizens in an effort to use publicly-released scientific data to create, build, and invent new solutions that address challenges of global importance, from the impact of weather upon the global economy to the depletion of ocean resources. According to the Challenge website:

There’s a new study out in tomorrow’s Science magazine that’s generating lots of buzz — trending, if you will — this afternoon: researchers have mined two years’ worth of Twitter data, from over 2.4 million users, to study the daily, weekly, and seasonal variations in the mood of people from 84 countries around the world. As one journalist put it: But while the findings aren’t necessarily surprising — and this isn’t the first “Twitter study” either — the fact that the two social scientists mined such a large data set to solve a problem that’s usually reserved for surveys or individual diaries is noteworthy. As the news staff of Science magazine points out in […]