Updated Thursday, March 29, at 10:55am: OSTP and the agencies have announced the Big Data R&D Initiative. See the latest details here. *** The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), together with the National Science Foundation (NSF), National Institutes of Health (NIH), U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), Department of Energy (DoE) Office of Science, and Department of Defense (DoD), including the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, will hold an event in Washington, DC, this Thursday addressing the challenges and opportunities relating to “Big Data.” The event will be webcast live from 2:00pm to 3:30pm EDT. According to the media advisory: Researchers in a growing number of fields are generating extremely large and complicated data sets […]

Late last month, the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) issued an Advance Notice of Proposed Guidance, seeking public comment on proposed changes to single audit, cost principles, and administrative requirements for Federal grants and cooperative agreements. According to OSTP, “In many instances (e.g., indirect-costs-setting policy), multiple options are outlined [in the advance notice], reflecting a range of approaches likely to be attractive to different sectors of the grants community.” In particular, the Advance Notice specifies the reform ideas outlined below:

The following is a special contribution to the CCC Blog by Stephanie Forrest, professor of computer science at the University of New Mexico — and until recently, a member of the CCC Council. Stephanie attended the World Economic Forum’s 2012 Annual Meeting earlier this year, and she writes about her experiences here.  U.S. computer science and engineering was well represented at January’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Several academic computer scientists were invited to participate in sessions known as Idea Labs, each of which was organized around a single theme and institution. Tomaso Poggio and Alex Pentland participated in a session titled “Worms, Machines and Brains with MIT”; Justine Cassell, Pradeep Khosla, Tom Mitchell and Manuela […]

Earlier today at a ribbon-cutting ceremony featuring White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) Director John Holdren and Chief of Naval Research Rear Admiral Matthew Klunder, the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) opened the Laboratory for Autonomous Systems Research (LASR) on its campus in Washington, DC. LASR aims “to support cutting-edge research in robotics and autonomous systems of interest to the Navy, the Marine Corps, and the Department of Defense, [including] unmanned underwater vehicles, autonomous firefighting robots, and sensor networks.” According to a post on the OSTP Blog announcing the opening: LASR will … advance the goals of the President’s National Robotics Initiative, a multi-agency effort to strengthen U.S. leadership in robotics and to […]

Earlier this month, the Advanced Projects Research Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) released a $150 million funding opportunity open to all breakthrough energy technologies. Individual awards under the Open FOA will range between $250,000 and $10 million. According to the announcement: To address the challenges imposed by the rapidly evolving global energy market, ARPA-E seeks to support transformational research in all areas of energy R&D, including resource identification, extraction, transportation and use, and energy generation, storage, transmission and use in both the transportation and stationary power sectors. Areas of research responsive to this FOA include (but are not limited to) electricity generation by both renewable and non-renewable means, electricity transmission, storage, and distribution; […]

On Feb. 16th, over 150 Federal officials, Congressional staffers, academic researchers, and industry leaders packed a room overlooking the United States Capitol to mark two decades of coordinated Federal investment in networking and information technology research and development with a daylong symposium exploring progress and prospects in the field. Today, I’m delighted to announce that we are launching a new website with complete materials from this extraordinary day — including videos, photos, slides, and written summaries from the 19 15-minute presentations by leaders of the field, plus a luncheon keynote by former Vice President Al Gore, a longtime champion of information technology R&D, and special remarks by former Congressman Tom […]