The following is a special contribution to this blog from Nabil R. Adam, a professor of computer and information systems and director of the recently-established information Technology for Emergency mAnageMent (i-TEAM) Research Laboratory at Rutgers University. Nabil has been on leave as a fellow at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Science and Technology Directorate for the last four years, and in June 2010, he organized and ran a workshop focused on emergency management. Here Nabil summarizes the workshop and some of the key themes that emerged. The Department of Homeland Security recently hosted a workshop titled “Emergency Management: Incident, Resource, and Supply Chain Management” at the University of California-Irvine’s […]

From Google’s Research Blog this afternoon: Human language is both rich and ambiguous. When we hear or read words, we resolve meanings to mental representations, for example recognizing and linking names to the intended persons, locations or organizations. Bridging words and meaning — from turning search queries into relevant results to suggesting targeted keywords for advertisers — is also Google’s core competency, and important for many other tasks in information retrieval and natural language processing. We are happy to release a resource, spanning 7,560,141 concepts and 175,100,788 unique text strings, that we hope will help everyone working in these areas [more after the jump]…  

Last fall, the Department of Defense (DoD) issued a Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) for its Defense University Research Instrumentation Program (DURIP), which “augments current university capabilities or develops new university capabilities to perform cutting-edge defense research.” At the time, the BAA specifically encouraged proposals “for instrumentation supporting research in robotics.” Today, the DoD is announcing the results of the competition — $54.7 million in awards to purchase state-of-the-art research equipment — and at least a dozen of these awards involve robotics research. According to the DoD press release (following the link):

The organizers for this year’s second KDD workshop on Data Mining Applications in Sustainability (SustKDD 2012) have issued a call for papers. The workshop seeks to bring together researchers working on applications of Knowledge Discovery and Data-mining (KDD) to sustainability in diverse areas, especially in infrastructures such as IT, Smart Grids, water, and transportation. From the call for papers (following the link):

The following is a special contribution to this blog from Mario Bergés, an assistant professor in the department of civil and environmental engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. Mario recently co-organized the first International Workshop on Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring. (This post originally appeared here.) Last Monday, May 7th, the 1st International Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring (NILM) Workshop took place on the campus of Carnegie Mellon University. Zico Kolter and I had been organizing this event for the past few months, in an attempt to bring together the community of researchers and industry practitioners who are working on electricity disaggregation. By all measures, the resulting event exceeded our expectations. We had a great turnout (60 participants) and […]

For those who missed last Tuesday’s webinar about the Core Techniques and Technologies for Advancing Big Data Science and Engineering (BIGDATA) program — the centerpiece of the Administration’s $200 million Big Data R&D Initiative — the National Science Foundation (NSF) and National Institutes of Health (NIH) today announced that they will hold a second webinar next Monday, May 21st at 11am EDT. Registration for the May 21st webinar (click here) will remain open until 11:59pm PDT on Sunday, May 20th. Questions about the solicitation may be e-mailed to bigdata@nsf.gov before or during the webinar. As we’ve reported before, the BIGDATA solicitation aims (following the link):