Google is calling for applications to its 2012 Google Policy Fellowships, which offer undergraduate, graduate, and law students interested in Internet and technology policy “the opportunity to spend the summer contributing to the public dialogue on these issues, and exploring future academic and professional interests.” According to Google: Fellows will have the opportunity to work at public interest organizations at the forefront of debates on broadband and access policy, content regulation, copyright and trademark reform, consumer privacy, open government, and more. Participating organizations are based in either Washington, DC, San Francisco, CA, Ottawa or Toronto, Canada and include: American Library Association, Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic, Center for Democracy […]

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), together with the recently created Center of Excellence for Collaborative Innovation (COECI), launched the USPTO Innovation Challenge last week, offering $50,000 in prizes for specialized algorithms that can “help bring the 7 million patents presently in the patent archive into the digital age.” In particular, the USPTO Innovation Challenge is seeking new algorithms to automatically identify and locate specific elements within patent documents, as part of a broader effort to improve the patent examination process. According to Robynn Sturm Steffen, a Senior Advisor in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP): Approximately half-a-million U.S. patents are filed by inventors, entrepreneurs, and businesses […]

Earlier this month, the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Directorate for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences (SBE) released a new report — Rebuilding the Mosaic: Fostering Research in the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences at the National Science Foundation in the Next Decade — representing the results of a year-long visioning process assessing the directorate’s existing research investments and identifying important research directions for the future. What’s interesting is that the report, which is based on 252 white paper submissions from 240 authors (received through an open submission process) specifically touts “an interdisciplinary, data-intensive, and collaborative vision for the future of SBE research” — one that necessitates new partnerships and synergies between social […]

The National Science Foundation (NSF) is out with a brief overview of the results of its annual Survey of Earned Doctorates (SED) for 2010, finding that the numbers of Ph.D.s in the computer sciences increased by 3.5 percent that year, more than in any other discipline. (The total number of doctorates awarded by U.S. academic institutions declined for the first time since 2002 — and NSF notes that reclassification of degrees and discontinuation of data collection in certain areas contributed at least in part to this drop.) According to the NSF InfoBrief:

The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) is out with a request for information (RFI) this month, seeking input on “a possible future IARPA investment (such as a program or grand challenge)” in automatic machine learning: Machine learning (ML) is used extensively in application areas of interest to IARPA including speech, language, vision, sensor processing, and multi-modal integration. Typically, expert practitioners in ML select appropriate architectures and algorithms for the application domain, performance requirements, and data characteristics of the problem at hand. Additionally, they engineer an appropriate set of features to be extracted from the data for use in the system design. Then, depending on the problem, data may be […]

Earlier today, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) released a new report — Trustworthy Cyberspace: Strategic Plan for the Federal Cybersecurity Research and Development Program — specifying an agenda for game-changing cybersecurity R&D. As U.S. CTO Aneesh Chopra and White House Cybersecurity Coordinator Howard Schmidt noted in a blog post, the report provides “a roadmap to ensuring long-term reliability and trustworthiness of the digital communications network that is increasingly at the heart of American economic growth and global competitiveness.” In particular, the plan defines four strategic thrusts (after the jump):