National Science Foundation (NSF) Assistant Director for the Directorate of Computer & Information Science & Engineering (CISE) James Kurose has issued the following letter to the community to request information on Mid-scale Research Infrastructure. Dear Colleague Letter: Request for Information on Mid-scale Research Infrastructure October 6, 2017 Overview This Request for Information (RFI) is issued in response to the American Innovation and Competitiveness Act (AICA, Public Law No. 114-329), Section 109. NSF seeks information on existing and future needs for mid-scale research infrastructure projects from the US-based NSF science and engineering community. Definitions For the purposes of this RFI, NSF defines Research Infrastructure (RI) as any combination of facilities, equipment, instrumentation, computational hardware and software, and […]

The National Science Foundation (NSF) recently released a new program solicitation on Cyberlearning for Work at the Human-Technology Frontier. The goal of the program is to support research of learning technologies for both educational and work settings. Proposals should utilize current knowledge about how people learn and emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence or virtual reality in order to facilitate lifelong learning. This cross-cutting program is connected with the NSF Directorates for Computer & Information Science & Engineering (CISE); Education & Human Resources (EHR); Engineering (ENG); and Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences (SBE). A portion of the program description reads as follows. This program solicits projects that are exploratory and experimental in nature. These […]

The National Science Foundation (NSF) recently announced $17.7 million in funding for 12 Transdisciplinary Research in Principles of Data Science (TRIPODS) projects, which will bring together the statistics, mathematics and theoretical computer science communities to develop the foundations of data science. Technological advances and unprecedented access to computing infrastructure have resulted in an explosion of data from different sources. The availability of these data — their volume and variety, and the speed at which they are collected — is transforming research in all fields of science and engineering. TRIPODS awards will enable data-driven discovery through major investments in state-of-the-art mathematical and statistical tools, better data mining and machine learning approaches, […]

Recently, the National Science Foundation (NSF) has been looking to highlight the value of convergence. The deep integration of multiple disciplines in order to advance scientific discovery and innovation. As a result, they have announced their first set of convergence awards. The 23 newly awarded projects will foster convergence to address grand challenges in the context of five of NSF’s “10 Big Ideas for Future NSF Investments,” a set of cutting-edge research agendas uniquely suited for NSF’s broad portfolio of investments. One of these five ideas is work in the human technology frontier space. This is also, quintessentially, one of the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) 2017-2018 task forces. The Human Technology Frontier task force focuses on the […]

The next WATCH talk, called The Science of Deep Specification is Thursday, September 21st, from 12 PM-1 PM EST. The presenter is Benjamin Pierce, a Henry Salvatori Professor of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania and a Fellow of the ACM. His research interests include programming languages, type systems, language-based security, computer-assisted formal verification, differential privacy, and synchronization technologies. He is the author of the widely used graduate textbooks Types and Programming Languages and Software Foundations. He has served as co-Editor in Chief of the Journal of Functional Programming, as Managing Editor for Logical Methods in Computer Science, and as editorial board member of Mathematical Structures in Computer Science, Formal Aspects of Computing, and […]

The following is a letter to the community from James Kurose, Assistant Director, and Erwin Gianchandani, Deputy Assistant Director, of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Directorate of Computer & Information Science & Engineering (CISE).  Dear Colleagues, We are pleased to announce that the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) has formed a search committee for the next Division Director for its Division of Computing and Communication Foundations (CCF). As many of you know, Rao Kosaraju, who has served as CCF Division Director since January 2015, will be completing his rotation and returning to his institution, Johns Hopkins University, this coming January.  While at NSF/CISE, Rao has provided truly outstanding […]