Lots of buzz this week about “Big Data,” and particularly the opportunities for government in this space. Our friend and colleague, Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) President Rob Atkinson, has written a great blog post over on the Innovation Policy Blog arguing for the utility of “Big Data”/analytics in the public sector: Recently more attention has been drawn to the emergence of “Big Data” — large scale data sets that businesses and government are using to unlock new value using today’s computing and communications power. As a McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) study recently showed, Big Data offers a wide range of commercial opportunities in virtually every sector of the economy for the United States. […]

(This post has been updated; please scroll down to see the latest.) At 11am EDT today, National Science Foundation (NSF) Director Subra Suresh — joined by numerous U.S. and international researchers, government officials, and National Academy of Sciences President Ralph Cicerone — will launch Science Across Virtual Institutes (SAVI), “an effort to facilitate collaboration among scientists, engineers and educators across the globe to better leverage taxpayer resources to spur innovation, enable discovery and help solve society’s most vexing problems.” According to the official NSF press release: Building on beneficial partnerships initiated by NSF-supported researchers, research institutes and universities, SAVI projects will address common challenges and serve as creative hubs for […]

This is a special contribution to this blog by Fred Roberts, director of the Center for Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science (DIMACS), and Stephen Greenfield, Professor of Mathematics and a member of the Graduate Faculty, at Rutgers. The pair organized a workshop entitled “U.S.-China Collaborations in Computer Science and Sustainability,” bringing together 45 U.S. and Chinese computer scientists, mathematicians, ecologists, and representatives from other disciplines for a two-day meeting Sept. 19-20 in Piscataway, NJ. The full program, including list of participants and talks, can be found here. In this post, Fred and Stephen summarize the workshop, including key findings. The Sept. 19-20 workshop at Rutgers followed a series of U.S.-China Computer Science Leadership Summits featuring leaders of […]

For the past two weeks, the National Mall in Washington, DC, has been transformed into a neighborhood of futuristic homes, with 20 teams from five countries spanning four continents competing in the U.S. Department of Energy’s annual Solar Decathlon — an award-winning program that challenges collegiate students from around the world “to design, build, and operate solar-powered houses that are affordable, highly energy efficient, attractive, and easy to live in.” Late Saturday, Energy Secretary Steven Chu announced the winners — and the team from the University of Maryland took home first place, scoring 951.151 points out of a possible 1,000. The Maryland team’s home — called WaterShed — harvests, recycles, and reuses water, conserving and producing resources with the water […]

In this month’s Communications of the ACM: The next decade will bring 10 technological changes that will transform the world, says Dave Evans, Cisco’s chief futurist. In his opinion, they are: The Internet Of Things. Evans predicts the number of Internet-connected “things” will reach 50 billion — more than six devices fore very person on Earth — by 2020. The Zettaflood Is Coming. This year the world is creating 1.2 zettabytes of unique data, mainly as a result of high-definition video. Evans expects 91% of Internet data will be video by 2015. Wisdom Of The Cloud. Evans says that, by 2020, one-third of all data will live in the cloud. “Already, the cloud […]

There’s a new study out in tomorrow’s Science magazine that’s generating lots of buzz — trending, if you will — this afternoon: researchers have mined two years’ worth of Twitter data, from over 2.4 million users, to study the daily, weekly, and seasonal variations in the mood of people from 84 countries around the world. As one journalist put it: But while the findings aren’t necessarily surprising — and this isn’t the first “Twitter study” either — the fact that the two social scientists mined such a large data set to solve a problem that’s usually reserved for surveys or individual diaries is noteworthy. As the news staff of Science magazine points out in […]