Last Wednesday, the NSF announced the second round of an international grant competition designed to spur cutting-edge research in the humanities and social sciences.  Called the “Digging into Data Challenge,” the competition specifically promotes large-scale, international and interdisciplinary analysis of large data sets in these fields. The competition asks interested scholars to design methods and tools to analyze large data sets associated with a million books, or a million pages of newspaper, or a million songs, for example. The announcement follows a successful trial round last year amongst teams of humanities experts, social scientists, and computer and information scientists.  This year, a total of 8 research funders are involved, with the […]

If you haven’t seen it already, the February 11 issue of Science magazine is worth a look.  It contains a special section — titled “Dealing with Data” — that describes the challenges and opportunities arising from the wealth of scientific data being generated. As the staff of Science writes in the overview piece: If we can use and reuse scientific data better, the opportunities, as indicated in many examples in this special section, are myriad. Large integrated data sets can potentially provide a much deeper understanding of both nature and society and open up many new avenues of research. And they are critical for addressing key societal problems—from improving public […]

Lots of interesting stories this past week of relevance to the field: Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers On Tuesday, the White House announced the names of 85 early-career researchers who will receive the government’s highest honor for young scientists and engineers — the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE). The PECASE awards were established in 1996 and are coordinated by the Office of Science and Technology Policy. Awardees are selected on the basis of their pursuit of innovative research at the frontiers of science and technology as well as their commitment to community service as demonstrated through scientific leadership, public education, or community outreach. […]

The Computing Community Consortium was launched three years ago –- in the Spring of 2007. The “long version” of what we’ve been up to is detailed in a formal self-assessment submitted to NSF in the Summer of 2009. The “PowerPoint version” is contained in an overview slideset. Here, I’m going to focus on just a few specific activities, to argue the benefits of having our act together as a field. Broad agenda-setting During the transition period to the Obama administration, we had the opportunity to feed a number of “white papers” into the transition team’s planning process.  Thanks to the receptiveness of the incoming administration, these white papers had impact […]

Why should you care about microbial communities? Except for viruses, they are the most abundant life on Earth and have an overwhelming effect on our environment and our lives. Consider that about half the carbon dioxide on Earth is processed through microbes that live in the oceans. Then consider that the most modern climate models of ocean life include just five organisms. This is despite recent findings that point to thousands of oceanic species, which do many different things and presumably influence our climate. Metagenomics is a relatively new field that seeks to understand the structure and function of the shockingly large number of microorganisms on our planet.  New technologies […]

The awarding of the $1 million Netflix Prize this week reopens an interesting bigger question:  Are prizes a viable mechanism for encouraging research in the computing fields?  From Netflix’s perspective, the answer is almost certainly yes.  Netflix CEO Reed Hastings is quoted telling the New York Times (probably tongue-in-cheek) “You’re getting Ph.D.’s for a dollar an hour.” Could prizes be useful to the broader computing community in advancing research?  The Clay Mathematics Institute established the Millenium Prizes in 2000, offering $1 million for the solutions to each of seven famous open problems, including the question of whether P=NP.  It’s hard to imagine that many researchers have decided to shape their […]