Following last month’s focus on smart health and wellbeing, IEEE Intelligent Systems is inaugurating the Department of AI and Sustainability — another area of national importance! — in its forthcoming November/December 2011 issue. Doug Fisher, a Professor of Computer Science and Computer Engineering at Vanderbilt University who recently served as a Program Director at the National Science Foundation (NSF), will be the department’s editor — and he’s just penned the debut article: When preparing for a March 2007 talk at [NSF], I searched the Web for scholarly work on AI and climate change, the natural environment, and sustainability. My search was not exhaustive, largely based on keywords, but it wasn’t trivial […]

Computing in Science and Engineering is out with a special issue for November/December 2011 focused on Big Data — and the significant research opportunities emerging from a growing wealth of scientific data. As guest editors Francis Alexander (Los Alamos National Laboratory), Adolfy Hoisie (Pacific Northwest National Laboratory), and Alexander Szalay (Johns Hopkins University) write in their introduction: With the exponential growth in data acquisition and generation — whether by next-generation telescopes, high-throughput experiments, petascale scientific computing, or high-resolution sensors — it’s an extremely exciting time for scientific discovery. As a result of these technological advances, the next decade will see even more significant impacts in fields such as medicine, astronomy and […]

At 10am EST this morning, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) — together with its Australian counterpart AusAID, World Vision U.S., and World Vision Australia, and the U.S. Department of Education (ED) — will launch a $20 million initiative to “focus global attention on finding ground-breaking, scalable innovations that improve early grade reading outcomes for all children in poor countries during the first three years of primary education.” Called “All Children Reading: A Grand Challenge for Development,” the program will provide catalytic seed grant funding through a competitive selection process to support “pioneering thinking that offers sustainable and scalable solutions for early grade reading.” The initiative will focus on groundbreaking solutions for two […]

As we’ve previously noted in this space, in December 2009, 10 red balloons were deployed from locations throughout the U.S. as part of the DARPA Network Challenge — a competition to “explore the roles the Interent and social networking play in the timely communication, wide-area team-building, and urgent mobilization required to solve broad-scope, time-critical problems.” The challenge: to be the first to submit the coordinates of the 10 8-foot red weather balloons. And the winning team — a group of MIT students — received a $40,000 prize. At the time, according to DARPA, “a senior analyst at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency characterized the problem as impossible” using traditional intelligence-gathering methods. […]

Earlier this fall, the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) issued a new solicitation for FY 2012 for its Cyberlearning: Transforming Education program, providing three different research categories of funding. The deadline for the first category — Exploratory Projects — is December 15. From the solicitation: Through the Cyberlearning: Transforming Education program, NSF seeks to integrate advances in technology with advances in what is known about how people learn to:   better understand how people learn with technology and how technology can be used productively to help people learn, through individual use and/or through collaborations mediated by technology; better use technology for collecting, analyzing, sharing, and managing data to […]

An feature in Computerworld last week takes an in-depth look at the “widely predicted Internet of Things (IoT), where anything with intelligence (including machines, roads, and buildings) will have an online presence, generating data that could be put to uses currently unimagined.” From the article: Dave Evans, chief futurist at Cisco… predicts 50 billion connected devices by 2020, and social networks to connect them. “In the coming years, anything that has an on-off switch will be on the network,” he says. “I foresee it in just about every industry and stream of life.”   The deluge has already begun.   “There are several industries where [the Internet of Things] is happening, and some […]