Last Wednesday, the NSF announced the second round of an international grant competition designed to spur cutting-edge research in the humanities and social sciences.  Called the “Digging into Data Challenge,” the competition specifically promotes large-scale, international and interdisciplinary analysis of large data sets in these fields. The competition asks interested scholars to design methods and tools to analyze large data sets associated with a million books, or a million pages of newspaper, or a million songs, for example. The announcement follows a successful trial round last year amongst teams of humanities experts, social scientists, and computer and information scientists.  This year, a total of 8 research funders are involved, with the […]

As we’ve previously blogged here, the CCC has sponsored three Challenges & Visions Sessions at computing research conferences over the past year, seeking to give time and attention to “wacky ideas” that may not otherwise make it through a conference’s normal reviewing process.  These sessions — run on an experimental basis, to assess their value to the conferences as well as the broader research community — have been quite successful in elevating promising visions and generating vigorous discussions.  Consequently, the CCC is announcing today a call for additional Challenges & Visions Sessions: The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is sponsoring an initiative to bring special “Challenges and Visions” tracks to leading computer […]

Over 280 leading networking researchers from around the country gathered this week for the 10th GENI Engineering Conference (GEC).  The meeting — co-hosted by the Polytechnic University of Puerto Rico and the University of Puerto Rico — came at a critical time in the evolution of the GENI Project:  out of the “startup phase,” the GENI Project Office (GPO) is seeking to substantially ramp up experimentation in the coming year, all the while enhancing build-outs in campuses and backbones throughout the nation as part of the growing meso-scale GENI. (As we’ve blogged in this space before, the GENI Project was first funded by NSF in 2007 — to take a […]

Ed Seidel, NSF’s Assistant Director for Mathematical and Physical Sciences and formerly the Director of the Foundation’s Office of Cyberinfrastructure, today delivered a presentation at Northwestern University on “Data and the Compute-Driven Transformation of Modern Science” as part of a quarterly seminar jointly sponsored by the school’s Physics and Astronomy departments.  Seidel noted the exponential growth in the last couple of decades in data from scientific experiments and simulation, and in the computational power to deal with it, and he emphasized the greater need for collaboration.  No longer can science be done with just a single professor working with just a couple of students.  “Software is the Modern Language of Science.” Seidel described many challenges.  He mentioned three crises: […]

Lots of interesting stories touching on computing research in The New York Times and Time magazine in the past couple weeks: – Feb. 28 — Remapping Computer Circuitry to Avert Impending Bottlenecks — Hewlett-Packard researchers have proposed a fundamental rethinking of the modern computer for the coming era of nanoelectronics — a marriage of memory and computing power that could drastically limit the energy used by computers. – Carrots, Sticks, and Digital Health Records — The United States is embarking this year on a grand experiment in the government-driven adoption of technology — ambitious, costly and potentially far-reaching in impact. The goal is to improve health care and to reduce its long-term […]

If you haven’t seen it already, the February 11 issue of Science magazine is worth a look.  It contains a special section — titled “Dealing with Data” — that describes the challenges and opportunities arising from the wealth of scientific data being generated. As the staff of Science writes in the overview piece: If we can use and reuse scientific data better, the opportunities, as indicated in many examples in this special section, are myriad. Large integrated data sets can potentially provide a much deeper understanding of both nature and society and open up many new avenues of research. And they are critical for addressing key societal problems—from improving public […]