We’ve previously described in this space the Materials Genome Initiative (MGI) — a $100 million initiative announced last June to drastically accelerate the discovery, development, and manufacturing of new and advanced materials — describing the critical role to be played by the computer and information sciences and engineering research community, including via predictive modeling, simulation, and visualization capabilities. Now there’s an interesting news focus (subscription required) in this week’s Science, noting, “Supercomputing power now makes it possible to compute the properties of thousands of crystalline materials in a flash and is expected to guide experimentalists where to search for the next best things.” According to the article (following the link):

Mario Bergés (CMU) and Computing Innovation Fellow Zico Kolter (MIT) are co-organizing the first International Workshop on Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring, to be held on the campus of Carnegie Mellon University on May 7th. With support from Bosch Research, the workshop will provide a forum to unite researchers working on the topic of energy disaggregation, particularly on sensing and/or algorithms aspects. The workshop will review the main types of approaches that have been explored to date, and discuss possible paths forward. Key foci will include the growing need for standardized datasets and performance metrics that can allow the field to move forward, as well as possible areas of collaboration among research groups from multiple […]

On Tuesday, the National Institute of Standards and Technology announced a solicitation for proposals that support long-term research in next-generation semiconductor technology, calling the work “critical to the future of the U.S. electronics industry.” Through the solicitation, NIST plans to issue one award of up to $2.6 million in Federal cost-shared funding (a minimum of 25 percent of a project’s budget must come from non-Federal sources) for the project’s first year, with the potential for continued funding for up to five years. Proposals are due by 5pm EDT on Monday, April 16th. According to the solicitation: One area where a clear long-term technological challenge resides is in the development of new […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC), together with the National Science Foundation (NSF), is co-sponsoring a limited-participation visioning workshop on computing for disaster management. Led by Robin Murphy (Texas A&M University) and Trevor Darrell (University of California, Berkeley), the workshop will identify ways in which fundamental computing research in the broadest terms can advance the field of emergency response and recovery. The workshop will take place in Washington, DC, on April 23-24, 2012. From the call for participation (following the link):

Earlier this month, we highlighted the Cash for Locating and Identifying Quick Response codes (CLIQR) Quest, a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) prize-based challenge seeking to advance the understanding of social media and the Internet. The challenge offered $40,000 to the first individual or team that could locate 7 posters appearing in U.S. cities bearing the DARPA logo and a quick response (QR) code. Though the challenge ran for 15 days — from Feb. 23rd through March 8th — unlike in past challenges, notably the DARPA Network “Red Balloon” Challenge, no team was able to locate all 7 posters and submit the corresponding QR codes. The reason? (Click “more” to find out!)

(This post has been updated; please scroll down for the latest.) In IEEE’s Spectrum this week, there’s an interesting interview about man-machine interfaces with neurosurgeon and self-described hacker Richard Bucholz, a Professor of Neurosurgery and the Medical Director for the St. Louis Regional MEG Center at Saint Louis University, and a leading participant in the Human Connectome Project — a $30 million National Institutes of Health (NIH) initiative to map the human brain. Disabilities such as epilepsy, depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and even Parkinson’s disease are being treated with neuroimplants. Other scientists are working to substitute hearing for sight in blind people, and still others want to solve blindness entirely by implanting cameras in […]