From Computerworld: Scientists at IBM Research today said they have achieved a major advance in quantum computing that will allow engineers to begin work on creating a full-scale quantum computer.   The breakthrough allowed scientists to reduce data error rates in elementary computations while maintaining the integrity of quantum mechanical properties in quantum bits of data, known as qubits.   The creation of a quantum computer would mean data processing power would be exponentially increased over what is possible with today’s conventional CPUs, according to Mark Ketchen, the manager of physics of information at the IBM’s TJ Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, NY.  

In recent weeks, open innovation company InnoCentive has launched a pair of competitions with significant R&D questions requiring advances in computing. One is focused on data-driven solutions for enabling “smart systems” in our cities, while the other seeks the development of simple, cost-effective, and consistent tools to improve diagnosis and monitoring of people with Alzheimer’s disease. In conjunction with The Economist, InnoCentive’s smart systems challenge calls for “clever data-driven visualizations that show how improvements to a public utility or infrastructure would improve the health, happiness, safety, aesthetics, etc., of a community” (more following the link).

The Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) has announced plans for its annual Spring Review, featuring work funded by AFOSR over the past year, as well as discussion of trends and plans for future basic research programs of interest to the Air Force. This year’s Spring Review will be held March 5-9 in Arlington, VA. The first two days of the event will be focused on the efforts of the Mathematics, Information, and Life Sciences Directorate, with talks spanning information and complex systems, decision making, and dynamical systems, control, optimization, and computational mathematics. Relevant portions of the schedule appear following the link:

The National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) issued a new National Strategic Plan for Advanced Manufacturing on Wednesday, documenting “the fundamental importance of advanced manufacturing” to the nation’s competitiveness and security and setting forth key objectives and priorities for Federal policy in this space. Among the objectives: Accelerating investment, especially by small- and medium-sized manufacturers; Making the education and training system more responsive to the demand for skills; Optimizing Federal advanced manufacturing R&D investments by taking a portfolio perspective; Increasing total public and private investments in advanced manufacturing R&D; and Fostering national and regional partnerships among all stakeholders in advanced manufacturing. Of particular interest are four categories of investments that “help to position […]

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has released a vision and strategic plan for Advanced Computing Infrastructure (ACI) seeking “to position and support the entire spectrum of NSF-funded communities at the cutting edge of advanced computing technologies, hardware, and software.” The report “also aims to promote a more complementary, comprehensive, and balanced portfolio of advanced computing infrastructure and programs for research and education to support multidisciplinary computational and data-enabled science and engineering that in turn support the entire scientific, engineering, and education community.” ACI is a key component of the Foundation’s Cyberinfrastructure for 21st Century Science and Engineering (CIF21) framework. Here’s the vision articulated in the report: NSF will be a leader in creating and deploying a comprehensive portfolio […]

Early last Saturday morning, I had the privilege and pleasure of organizing and moderating a symposium at the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s (AAAS) 2012 Annual Meeting in Vancouver. The 90-minute session — titled Data to Knowledge to Action: Computational Science in a Global Knowledge Society — sought to describe how advances in computing research are enabling a “data to knowledge to action” pipeline that is increasingly critical for facilitating a 21st-century global knowledge society. Over 70 people packed into a small room in the Vancouver Convention Center to hear the session’s featured speakers, Eric Horvitz, Peter Stone, and Deborah Estrin (slide shows after the jump).