Computer scientist — and 2009 Computing Innovation Fellow (CIFellow) — Nick Diakopoulos recently published a white paper about the similarities between journalism and computer science that’s attracted quite a bit of buzz. In an article in Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab earlier this month: What if journalism were invented today? How would a computer scientist go about building it, improving it, iterating it?   He might start by mapping out some fundamental questions: What are the project’s values and goals? What consumer needs would it satisfy? How much should be automated, how much human-powered? How could it be designed to be as efficient as possible [more after the jump]?  

Later this month, the best and brightest cyber defense students from 10 universities throughout the country will descend on San Antonio, TX, for the 8th annual National Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition (CCDC) sponsored by Deloitte. The three-day final, which kicks off on April 20th, challenges participants on the “operational aspect of managing and protecting an existing ‘commercial’ network infrastructure”: You have just been hired as the network and security administrators at a small company and will be taking administrative control of all information systems. You know very little about the network, what security level has been maintained, or what software has been installed. You have a limited time frame to familiarize yourself with the […]

This week’s Science magazine features a special section on computational biology: Today, the availability of vast quantities of new data, together with striking advances in computing power, is promising to give us new insights into the mechanisms of life. This special section … highlights recent advances and outstanding challenges. Such a section would be interesting by itself. But there’s one particular perspective — “Dusting Off the Turing Test” (subscription required) — that stands out. In the introduction to the special section, the editors of Science reference Turing: A discussion of computational biology has to start with a pioneer of the field, Alan Turing, especially in this centennial year of his birth. He introduced us […]

Recently-departed Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Director Regina Dugan gave a “breathtaking” TEDTalk at the 2012 TED Conference in Long Beach, CA, in late February, describing some of the extraordinary projects — a robotic hummingbird, a prosthetic arm controlled by thought, etc. — funded by her agency, and the paths to success. Dugan began: You should be nice to nerds. In fact, I’d go so far as to say, “If you don’t already have a nerd in your life, you should get one.” I’m just sayin’.   Scientists and engineers change the world.   I’d like to tell you about a magical place called DARPA where scientists and engineers defy the […]

The Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) has announced a new basic research initiative seeking to bring together the computational hardware, software, aerospace sciences, physics, and applied mathematics communities “to develop a novel and unique capability to design, optimize, build, and deploy specialized high-performance computing platforms to speed development of Air Force systems.” According to the AFOSR’s Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) (emphasis added): The history of high-performance computing, indeed computational modeling in general, has been portrayed as an arms race between ever faster computer hardware, often characterized by the ubiquitous Moore’s law describing the exponential growth in our ability to put computing machinery onto integrated circuits, and the equally advancing capability […]

The Department of Education’s (ED) Office of Educational Technology today released a draft issue brief — Enhancing Teaching and Learning Through Educational Data Mining and Learning Analytics — representing the results of a months-long discourse among 8 academic and 15 industrial data mining and learning analytics experts conducted by SRI International. The brief, inspired by ED’s 2010 National Educational Technology Plan (NETP), articulates the challenges and opportunities of Big Data in improving student outcomes and overall productivity of K-2 education systems. It focuses on three key research areas — educational data mining, learning analytics, and visual data analytics — and offers a set of corresponding recommendations, categorized by various stakeholders. ED is now […]