The future is bright for 40 young finalists from Intel’s 2015 Science Talent Search, who as high school seniors are already completing and publishing graduate level science projects. The Intel Science Talent Search (Intel STS), a program of the Society for Science & the Public, is the nation’s most prestigious pre-college science competition. Alumni of STS have made extraordinary contributions to science and hold more than 100 of the world’s most distinguished science and math honors, including the Nobel Prize and the National Medal of Science. Each year, 300 Intel STS semifinalists and their schools are recognized. From that select pool of semifinalists, 40 student finalists are invited to Washington, […]

The next WATCH Talk is Thursday, March 19, 12:00-1:00PM EDT. Mary Ellen Callahan, will discuss Cybersecurity and Privacy: Complementary– Not Mutually Exclusive– Concepts. Mary Ellen Callahan, Chair of Jenner & Block’s Privacy and Information Governance Practice, has unique and broad experience advising clients at the interface of privacy protection with cybersecurity and national security.  A nationally recognized privacy attorney, she served as Chief Privacy Officer of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security from 2009 until August 2012.  She is a prolific writer and speaker on cutting-edge commercial privacy issues. Abstract   Cybersecurity information sharing is vital to protect the private and public sector assets. With that said, privacy protections must […]

The National Institute of Health (NIH) is determined to reduce the cost and time it takes to discover viable therapeutic targets, which drive the changes in the molecular networks leading to the signs and symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease. NIH is leading the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and various other industry and academic scientists in a public-private partnership effort to create a Big Data portal for Alzheimer’s drug discovery. This Accelerating Medicine Partnership for Alzheimer’s disease (AMP-AD) Knowledge Portal is public so it will enable sharing, transparency, reproducibility, and analysis of large biomedical datasets. The hope is that it will shorten the time between discovery of potential drug targets to development […]

Check out these upcoming internship and fellowship opportunities for students. White House OSTP Internship– Deadline: Sunday, March 15th The Office of Science and Technology Policy is currently accepting applications for its Summer 2015 Policy Internship Program. The application deadline is 11:59pm Sunday, March 15. Students who are U.S. citizens and who will be actively enrolled during the Fall 2015 semester are welcome to apply. Presidential Innovation Fellows (PIF) – Deadline: rolling admission The Presidential Innovation Fellows program brings the principles, values, and practices of the innovation economy into government through the most effective agents of change we know: our people. This highly competitive 12- month program pairs talented, diverse individuals from the […]

Contributions to this post were made by Shashi Shekhar, Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council member and Distinguished University Professor at the University of Minnesota.  The Task Force on American Innovation held a Capitol Hill reception titled “Deconstructing Precision Agriculture” on Wednesday. The Computing Research Association was a co-sponsor of the event. It showcased U.S. farmers, leading agriculture technology companies, and scientists including Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council member and University of Minnesota distinguished university professor Shashi Shekhar. The event exhibited three essential technologies of precision agriculture that originated from a broad spectrum of federally funded science: Guidance Systems and GPS, Data & Mapping with GIS, and Sensors & Robotics. Rajiv Khosla, Professor […]

There has been a tremendous amount of press on the astonishing advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) and the negative impacts that it could have on our society. Former Computing Community Consortium (CCC) council member, Eric Horvitz recently published a piece about the Benefits and Risks of Artificial Intelligence. Others have commented that AI could take our jobs and even potentially kill us. Elon Musk, Tesla chief executive, called artificial intelligence our biggest existential threat at the MIT Aeronautics and Astronautics department’s Centennial Symposium in October. I think we should be very careful about artificial intelligence. If I were to guess like what our biggest existential threat is, it’s probably that. So we need to be very […]