At a press briefing featuring high-ranking Federal, state, and local officials on its Gaithersburg, MD, campus last month, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) announced a new partnership to establish the National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence, a “public-private collaboration for accelerating the widespread adoption of integrated cybersecurity tools and technologies.” The Center received $10 million in the FY 2012 appropriations to cover startup costs, and expects to make available opportunities for grants to address identified needed technologies. According to the Center website: The Center brings experts together from industry, government and academia under one roof to develop practical, interoperable cybersecurity approaches that address the real world needs of complex […]

Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Director Regina Dugan recently sat on an panel sponsored by Washington Post Live, the live journalism arm of The Washington Post Co. The panel — titled “Innovation and Ideas” — was part of a special series on American Competitiveness: What Works in which corporate executives, political leaders, economists and other experts charted a path for U.S. competitiveness, describing big obstacles — as well as reasons for optimism. As part of a special section in last week’s Post summarizing the panels, Dugan penned a piece describing her view of ideas and innovation — and touched on a recent breakthrough enabled by advances in computing. Here it is (after the jump):

The National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) issued a new National Strategic Plan for Advanced Manufacturing on Wednesday, documenting “the fundamental importance of advanced manufacturing” to the nation’s competitiveness and security and setting forth key objectives and priorities for Federal policy in this space. Among the objectives: Accelerating investment, especially by small- and medium-sized manufacturers; Making the education and training system more responsive to the demand for skills; Optimizing Federal advanced manufacturing R&D investments by taking a portfolio perspective; Increasing total public and private investments in advanced manufacturing R&D; and Fostering national and regional partnerships among all stakeholders in advanced manufacturing. Of particular interest are four categories of investments that “help to position […]

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has released a vision and strategic plan for Advanced Computing Infrastructure (ACI) seeking “to position and support the entire spectrum of NSF-funded communities at the cutting edge of advanced computing technologies, hardware, and software.” The report “also aims to promote a more complementary, comprehensive, and balanced portfolio of advanced computing infrastructure and programs for research and education to support multidisciplinary computational and data-enabled science and engineering that in turn support the entire scientific, engineering, and education community.” ACI is a key component of the Foundation’s Cyberinfrastructure for 21st Century Science and Engineering (CIF21) framework. Here’s the vision articulated in the report: NSF will be a leader in creating and deploying a comprehensive portfolio […]

Last week, the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Emerging Technologies released a consensus list — the result of input from “some of the world’s leading minds within the entire [Global Agenda Council] network” — of “the top 10 emerging technologies for 2012.” These are the technologies that have the greatest potential to create new industries and impact new ones by providing solutions to global challenges. Atop the list — which is ordered starting with the technology with the greatest potential — is “informatics for adding value to information”: The quantity of information now available to individuals and organizations is unprecedented in human history, and the rate of information generation […]

Beginning at 8:15am EST today, we will be streaming live via the web an all-day symposium — titled The Impact of NITRD: Two Decades of Game-Changing Breakthroughs in Networking and Information Technology — marking two decades of the Federal Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) Program. Watch it live following the link!