As we described in this space yesterday, this morning at an event at the White House, the Obama Administration will formally launch the US Ignite Broadband Initiative, an at-scale, nationwide innovation ecosystem for developing and deploying public sector applications and services on ultra-high-speed, software-defined networks. The announcement will be streamed live beginning at 9am EDT — and we’ll cover it below (more after the jump…).

(This post has been updated; scroll down for the latest.) At a White House event Thursday morning, the Administration will formally announce new steps to expand and improve access to next-generation broadband technologies and applications — including the launch of US Ignite, a new public-private partnership spanning more than 100 members that will seek to bring together computing researchers, software and application developers, broadband carriers, and broadband users so that they can take advantage of ultra-high-speed, programmable broadband networks. The US Ignite partnership is being largely convened by the National Science Foundation (NSF), with the support of other Federal agencies, industry, non-profits, and local communities. Its key mission will be to leverage NSF’s […]

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has issued a solicitation — Spatial Uncertainty: Data, Modeling, and Communication — for innovative research that identifies sources of spatial uncertainty in public health data, incorporates the inaccuracy into statistical methods, and develops novel tools to visualize the nature and consequences of the spatial uncertainty. The solicitation, which spans 7 NIH institutes, offers deadlines of February 5, June 5, and October 5 through summer 2014. According to the NIH (following the link):

The heads of the National Science Foundation (NSF) and Japan Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) issued a joint statement this afternoon affirming a commitment to foster multi-national, multi-disciplinary research collaborations on disaster response, particularly in light of the opportunities being enabled by ‘Big Data’: The catastrophic consequences of natural and human disasters have been demonstrated repeatedly in recent years, most notably in the Great East Japan earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster but also in the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, Hurricane Katrina, and regional droughts, floods and fires. These events clearly demonstrate the urgent need for basic research to advance fundamental knowledge and innovation for disaster prevention, mitigation and […]

The U.S Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) — notably its Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) and National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) — together with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) yesterday launched a nationwide prize competition to develop personal air pollution and health sensors. In particular, the HHS and EPA are seeking to bring health and computing researchers together to develop highly portable sensors that can measure air quality data while monitoring a person’s physiological response to air pollution. Proposals are due by October 5 — and up to four finalists will receive $15,000 and be invited to develop their proposals into working prototypes, […]

Last week, the UC Berkeley’s School of Information held a forum — called the DataEDGE Conference — seeking to explore the challenges and opportunities associated with the transition to a data-intensive economy. One of the speakers was danah boyd, Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research and an Assistant Professor at New York University, who discussed the implications of Big Data on privacy — and the role for researchers and technologists moving forward. The New York Times‘ Bits Blog has coverage of boyd’s talk: “Privacy is a source of tremendous tension and anxiety in Big Data,” says Danah Boyd, a senior researcher at Microsoft Research. Speaking last week at a conference on Big Data at the University of […]