On Feb. 16th, over 150 Federal officials, Congressional staffers, academic researchers, and industry leaders packed a room overlooking the United States Capitol to mark two decades of coordinated Federal investment in networking and information technology research and development with a daylong symposium exploring progress and prospects in the field. Today, I’m delighted to announce that we are launching a new website with complete materials from this extraordinary day — including videos, photos, slides, and written summaries from the 19 15-minute presentations by leaders of the field, plus a luncheon keynote by former Vice President Al Gore, a longtime champion of information technology R&D, and special remarks by former Congressman Tom […]

The Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) has issued a call for 2012 EERE Postdoctoral Research Awards, intended to provide recent Ph.D. recipients with opportunities to conduct research at universities, national laboratories, and other research facilities. This year’s program builds upon 14 inaugural awardees funded in 2011, and includes at least one research topic that requires a strong computer science or software background. The deadline to submit an award application is May 1, 2012. According to the EERE website: The objective of the EERE Postdoctoral Research Awards is to create the next generation of scientific leaders in energy efficiency and renewable energy by attracting the best scientists and engineers […]

The U.S. Department of State has unveiled the Tag Challenge, a “social gaming competition” in which participants will attempt to find five “suspects” as part of a simulated law enforcement search spanning five cities throughout North American and Europe on March 31st. The winning entrant — the first participant or team to successfully locate and photograph all five suspects — will receive a $5,000 cash prize. According to the contest website: Jewel thieves have stolen a prized diamond. Help find them. Win $5,000.   The infamous Panther Five has pulled an audacious new heist: they’ve stolen the world’s 3rd most expensive jewel, the Adly Diamond, from the Overholt Showroom in Washington, DC. […]

Vijay Kumar, Professor of Mechanical Engineering & Applied Mechanics as well as Computer & Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania, delivered a fascinating talk at last month’s 2012 TED Conference in Long Beach, CA, summarizing recent advances in his General Robotics, Automation, Sensing and Perception (GRASP) Lab. Kumar described how his lab is blending computer science and mechanical engineering to create flying quadrotor robots, which “move together in eerie formation, tightening themselves into perfect battalions, even filling in the gap when one of their own drops out.” According to Kumar: [Agile aerial] robots like this have many applications. You can send them inside buildings as first responders to look for intruders, […]

The National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC) — the newest of the national synthesis centers funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) focused on fostering synthetic, actionable science related to the structure, functioning, and sustainability of socio-environmental systems — has issued a call for participation in a July workshop on visualization technologies that support research on human-environment interactions. Abstracts are due by April 20th, and travel expenses for lead authors will be covered by SESYNC. According to the call: One of SESYNC’s strategic goals is to foster the development of computational tools and services in support of researchers including scholars studying human-environment interactions.   SESYNC is hosting this workshop to focus especially […]

Last week, we blogged about Larry Smarr’s efforts to quantify his own health. Turns out Larry is speaking out today, in his own words, as part of a front-page profile on the front page of The San Diego Tribune: “Quantified health, to me, means tracking data about your body — as simple as weighing yourself on a scale once a day to as complicated as wearing a device at night to measure every 30 seconds your sleep state…   “The reason you do this — you modify your behavior. And it’s the same thing as you drive your car. You look at the speedometer, and if it’s a 60-mile-per-hour zone, you try to […]