Researchers from multiple disciplines spanning computer science, mathematics, the social, behavioral, and economic sciences, and biology gathered at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology last week for the first-ever Collective Intelligence conference. Organized by Tom Malone (MIT) and Luis von Ahn (Carnegie Mellon University), the conference sought papers about behavior that is both collective (spanning groups of individual actors, including people, computational agents, and organizations) and intelligent (the collective behavior of the group exhibits characteristics such as perception, learning, judgment, or problem solving). Over 100 papers were submitted for consideration, and 18 were selected for presentation (following the link):

The following is a special contribution to this blog from Elizabeth L. Grossman, a member of Microsoft Corporation’s Technology Policy Group. Yesterday, Microsoft’s Innovation & Policy Center, in Washington, DC, hosted a panel discussion on “21st Century Cities” as part of the @Microsoft Conversations series. The panel explored the technology and policy opportunities and challenges around making our cities smarter and more energy efficient, such as how information technology (IT) can link people, transportation, and buildings. This blog post provides information about some of the Microsoft sustainability activities in this area — particularly how we use our campus and facilities as a living lab — and future directions in computing […]

The National Science Foundation (NSF), in partnership with the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), and a consortium of French agencies, has announced a new program under its Science, Engineering, and Education for Sustainability (SEES) initiative focused on the Arctic. This program — dubbed Arctic SEES, or simply ArcSEES — seeks “fundamental research that improves our ability to evaluate the sustainability of the Arctic human-environmental system as well as integrated efforts which will provide community-relevant sustainability pathways and engineering solutions.” As with several SEES solicitations issued in FY 2012, the FY 2013 ArcSEES solicitation offers opportunities for computing researchers. In particular, from the […]

The National Science Foundation (NSF) and Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC) have just announced a new joint initiative — Failure-Resistant Systems (FRS) — that seeks to address “compelling research challenges in failure resistant systems that are of paramount importance to industry, academia, and society at large.” According to the solicitation, which spans NSF’s directorates for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) and Engineering (ENG) as well as the SRC (emphasis added): New approaches in the design of electronic circuits and systems are needed for products and services that continue to operate correctly in the presence of transient, permanent, or systematic failures. From large information processing systems supporting communications and computation, to small embedded systems targeting medical and […]

David Ferrucci, the IBM Research Staff Member who led the development of Watson — the question-answering system that bested human competitors on Jeopardy! in February 2011 — recently visited the National Science Foundation (NSF) to describe the fundamental advances underpinning the supercomputer. While there, Ferrucci took a few minutes to sit down for an interview by Helen Hastings, a senior at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (TJHSST) in Alexandria, Va., who earlier this year was named one of the recipients of the National Center for Women & Information Technology’s (NCWIT) 2012 Award for Aspirations in Computing. Hastings asked Ferrucci how he assembled his team, the challenges the team faced, what the Watson success means […]

The National Science Foundation (NSF) last week issued a new solicitation under its Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) program, providing a specific track for training the next generation of researchers in computational and data-enabled science and engineering. The solicitation is part of the Foundation’s (and Administration’s) Big Data Initiative, which was announced last month. According to the new solicitation (emphasis added): Building upon the IGERT platform, the purpose of this IGERT solicitation is to support new models in graduate education in which students are engaged in an environment that supports innovation to learn through hands-on experience how their own research may contribute in new ways to benefit society and to learn the processes for the successful […]