Farnam Jahanian, the Assistant Director for CISE, testified at a U.S. House of Representatives hearing on May 25th. The hearing, convened jointly by the Subcommittee on Technology and Innovation and the Subcommittee on Research and Science Education, examined Federal agency efforts to improve our nation’s cybersecurity and prepare the future cybersecurity talent needed for preserving national security. As part of his testimony, Jahanian listed a series of contributions the computing research community has made with support from NSF and other Federal funding agencies: Cryptographic schemes and cryptographic-based authentication, enabling today’s Internet commerce, supporting secure digital signatures and online credit card transactions Program analyses and verification techniques, enabling the early detection of […]

The U.S. Department of Energy — together with the Government of India — recently established a Joint Clean Energy Research and Development Center (JCERDC) “designed to promote clean energy innovation by teams of scientists and engineers from India and the United States.” DoE is committing $25 million to the Center over the next five years. The first JCERDC solicitation was issued earlier this month, with a focus on three priority areas. At least one of these — building energy efficiency — specifically aligns with computing research: The objective is to contribute to dramatic improvements in the energy efficiency of buildings (commercial or residential) in the United States and India. Recommended topics include: building […]

What would you do with a 1 Gbps, layer 2 programmable, sliceable network? That’s the central question underlying the US Ignite Gigabit Applications Workshop, a daylong meeting co-hosted by the NSF’s CISE Directorate and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) early last week. The workshop — supported by several other Federal agencies as well as a number of public and private partners — brought together over 80 individuals from colleges/universities, for-profit companies, non-profit organizations, and Federal, state, and local governments from across the country. About US Ignite Recent investments in broadband (>100 Mbps up and down) in highly innovative cities and regions across the country are […]

A number of agencies within the NIH have come together to announce a one-day meeting on “Crowdsourcing: The Art and Science of Open Innovation,” to be held on the NIH grounds in Bethesda, MD, July 18, 2011.  The goal of the meeting is to lay the foundation for running successful challenges in biomedical and health research. Specifically, the meeting will: explore new ways to incentivize innovation in biomedical research with the prize authority recently given to all Federal agencies by Congress. The meeting will focus on the key aspects of this new approach that include: how to identify problems that can be solved through open innovation; how to communicate a scientific […]

The Computing Research Association recently published the results of its annual Taulbee Survey, and the numbers of PostDocs rose to record levels, continuing a trend that we have witnessed for more than a decade — and bringing new meaning to the CRA’s PostDoc white paper effort. Background As we have blogged here before, CRA — the umbrella organization of the CCC — initiated an effort last fall to engage the community in a conversation about PostDocs, at a time when a growing number of new CS PhDs appeared to be going that route. A committee commissioned by CRA prepared a white paper reporting the statistics associated with academic and industry […]

The NSF, NIH, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and McKesson Foundation announced this week a call for white papers on innovative methods to accelerate the evaluation of the efficacy and safety of mobile health technologies — in anticipation of a workshop later this year that will serve as the basis for defining a research agenda for evaluation of mHealth technology: Mobile health (mHealth) has the potential to simultaneously reduce the cost of health care and improve our health by encouraging healthy behaviors, providing continuous monitoring to prevent or reduce health problems, reducing acute health care visits, and providing personalized, real-time intervention in the mobile environment. However, traditional methods of evaluation needed to address efficacy and safety in mHealth are […]