The following is a special contribution to this blog from the organizing committee of the National Science Foundation (NSF) workshop to Identify Interdisciplinary Data Science Approaches and Challenges to Enhance Understanding of Interactions of Food Systems with Energy and Water Systems — held during October 5-6, 2015 at the National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) Waterfront Centre in Washington, DC. This article summarizes some of the highlights of the workshop. In the coming decades, the world population is projected to grow significantly resulting in increased strains on the world’s limited food, energy, water and other natural resources. Furthermore, these strains may be amplified due to the effects of global climate change and increasing […]

The MacArthur Foundation has named its 2015 class of MacArthur Fellows, recognizing 24 exceptionally creative individuals with a track record of achievement and the potential for significant contributions in the future. Fellows will each receive a no-strings-attached stipend of $625,000, paid out over five years. The Fellowship comes with no stipulations or reporting requirements, and allows recipients maximum freedom to follow their own creative visions. One of the fellows is John Novembre, a computational biologist in the Department of Human Genetics at the University of Chicago, who is shedding new light on human evolutionary history, population structure and migration, and the etiology of genetic diseases. Another one of the fellows is Christopher Ré, […]

The following Great Innovative Idea is from John Oberlin, Maria Meier, Tim Kraska, and Stefanie Tellex in the Computer Science Department at Brown University. Their Acquiring Object Experiences at Scale was one of the winners at the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) sponsored Blue Sky Ideas Track Competition at the AAAI-RSS Special Workshop on the 50th Anniversary of Shakey: The Role of AI to Harmonize Robots and Humans in Rome, Italy. It was a half day workshop on July 16th during the Robotics Science and Systems (RSS) 2015 Conference. The Innovative Idea Baxter is a two armed manipulator robot which which is gaining popularity in the research and industrial communities. At […]

The U.S. Department of Commerce‘s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) announced the next round of the Global City Teams Challenge (GCTC) at a White House Smart City Forum hosted by the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). See the White House Fact Sheet to read all the announcements made at the Forum. NIST announced that the kick-off conference for the next round of the Global City Teams Challenge will take place November 12-13, 2015 at NIST’s Campus in Gaithersburg, Maryland. Registration for the conference is now open. Please use this link to register. There is no registration fee. Pre-registration is required and closes November 5, 2015. The draft agenda can […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Computing in the Physical World Task Force has just released a community whitepaper on Systems Computing Challenges in the Internet of Things. The Task Force, lead by CCC Council Member Ben Zorn from Microsoft Research, is looking at core research challenges that the Internet of Things (IoT) presents. This whitepaper highlights these challenges and provides recommendations that will help address inadequacies in existing systems, practices, tools, and policies. The recommendations are summarized below: Invest in research to facilitate the construction, deployment, and automated analysis of multi-component systems with complex and dynamic dependences. IoT systems by their nature will have dynamic membership and operate in unknown and unpredictable environments that include, […]

The National Science Foundation Directorate for Computer & Information Science & Engineering (CISE) is hosting a webinar on Friday, September 25, at 12:30 PM EST on Revealing knowledge bases of educational research, presented by Kristine Lund. Dr. Lund is a CNRS Senior Research Engineer in the ICAR language sciences laboratory at the University of Lyon and served as the vice-director of ICAR for 4 years (2007-2010). An English-French-Finnish trilingual, she is also currently Chief Scientific Officer at the www.Cognik.net company and one of its three co-founders. CogniK personalizes and adapts multimedia content for specific audiences. Abstract: Educational research covers a diverse area of topics ranging from psychological principles of learning and the role […]