The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has scheduled two meetings in early May to facilitate strategic planning for its Common Fund, seeking to gather input from the research community that will help inform potential new program ideas. Among the broad themes around which the NIH wishes to center discussion at these “forward focus workshops”: computational and informatics challenges. The Common Fund supports (after the jump):

The Department of Education’s (ED) Office of Educational Technology today released a draft issue brief — Enhancing Teaching and Learning Through Educational Data Mining and Learning Analytics — representing the results of a months-long discourse among 8 academic and 15 industrial data mining and learning analytics experts conducted by SRI International. The brief, inspired by ED’s 2010 National Educational Technology Plan (NETP), articulates the challenges and opportunities of Big Data in improving student outcomes and overall productivity of K-2 education systems. It focuses on three key research areas — educational data mining, learning analytics, and visual data analytics — and offers a set of corresponding recommendations, categorized by various stakeholders. ED is now […]

Yesterday, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) announced that it will convene a Grand Challenges conference this summer, highlighting the “progress the Administration has made on existing Grand Challenge initiatives” and recognizing “new commitments and actions by Federal agencies, companies, philanthropists, universities, and non-profits to set and meet Grand Challenges.” To aid with the Administration’s quest, today the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is calling on the computing research community to submit ideas for Grand Challenge topics. In a blog post yesterday, OSTP Deputy Director for Policy Tom Kalil and Assistant Director for Grand Challenges Cristin Dorgelo wrote:

The Computing Research Association (CRA) today released a report — Computing Degree and Enrollment Trends, 2010-2011 — providing summary data from its annual Taulbee survey of Ph.D.-granting departments in computer science and allied fields in the U.S. and Canada. As posted on CRA’s Policy Blog: Enrollments in undergraduate computer science programs rose 9.6 percent in the 2011-12 school year, the fourth straight year of increase…  

The following is a special contribution to this blog by Michael E. Gorman, a Professor in the department of science, technology, and society (STS) at the University of Virginia. Mike recently completed a rotation as a program director at the National Science Foundation, and co-funded a workshop on transformative research that took place in Washington, DC, last month. During my two-year stint as a rotator at NSF, I looked for places where I could add value. There was a lot of discussion about transformative research and even some special funds that could be used for projects deemed transformative. In September 2007, the National Science Board (NSB) “unanimously approved a motion to […]

Later today, the Department of Energy (DoE) — together with Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E), Itron, and Gridwise Alliance — will launch the Apps for Energy competition, “challenging developers to use the Green Button data access program to bring residential and commercial utility data to life.” Through the competition, DoE will offer $100,000 in cash prizes to the software developers and designers who submit the best apps, as judged by a panel of government officials, energy industry leaders, and information technology experts (more after the jump).