(This post has been updated; please scroll down for the latest.) Yesterday, the National Science Foundation (NSF) announced a competition for Sustainability Research Networks (SRNs) — part of the broader NSF investment in Science, Engineering, and Education for Sustainability (SEES) — seeking to foster collaborative, multi-disciplinary approaches for pursuing the fundamental science and engineering necessary to understand and overcome barriers to sustainable human well-being. From the official solicitation: Sustainability Research Networks will engage and explore fundamental theoretical issues and empirical questions in sustainability science, engineering, and education that will increase our understanding of the ultimate sustainability challenge — maintaining and improving the quality of life for the nation within a healthy Earth system. […]

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 […]

Ever tried baking — yes, baking — and found it challenging? Well, try teaching it to a robot. That’s just what a group of researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have done. Graduate student Mario Bollini, a member of Daniela Rus’s Distributed Robotics Lab, has spent the past several months programming the R&D platform PR2 robot developed by Willow Garage to bake cookies from scratch: While the project was originally intended as a simple introductory project, it has turned out to be quite challenging due to all of the nuances involved with programming a robot to follow a lengthy list of tasks, while also employing vision, object […]

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):

A couple months ago, I blogged about David Ferrucci’s excellent keynote at this year’s Federated Computing Research Conference (FCRC) in San Jose, CA — noting how Ferrucci stepped through the creation of Watson, from conception of the “Jeopardy!” challenge in 2004 to the supercomputer’s nationally televised victory earlier this year. Well, now, ACM has made Ferrucci’s talk — along with the rest of this year’s FCRC plenaries — available through its Digital Library free of cost. Simply click here and create a free profile to either download or stream the 40-minute presentation.   And read the original summary of Ferrucci’s talk after the jump…

The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation has just announced a Request for Ideas (RFI) about Data Intensive Science: The increasing volume and complexity of scientific data are overwhelming current research practices, and create additional barriers to an already challenged science infrastructure, workforce and funding landscape. Many agencies and foundations are looking at ways to best combat the growing wave of challenges caused by today’s data deluge, and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation’s RFI on Data Intensive Science is intended to add to this growing body of thinking. This RFI is being conducted in the open and for the benefit of anyone looking to navigate these areas.   We welcome […]