The following Great Innovative Idea is from Yao-Yi Chiang from the University of Southern California. His Querying Historical Maps as a Unified, Structured, and Linked Spatiotemporal Source paper was the first place winner at the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) sponsored Blue Sky Ideas Track Competition at the ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems 2015 (SIGSPATIAL 2015) in Seattle, Washington. The Innovative Idea Historical maps hold a great deal of detailed geographic information at various times in the past but finding relevant maps is difficult and the map content are not machine-readable. Using computer algorithms and geospatial technology applications, I am building the techniques to unlock historical information from maps. I envision a […]

This weekend the president unveiled a historic plan which will revolutionize the way students are taught in schools, by giving them a chance to learn computer science (CS). With the shifting economy, policy makers, business leaders, and educators are finally recognizing that CS is a basic skill necessary for economic opportunity and social mobility. This is a change that our community has recognized for many years. As we noted a few weeks ago with the release of our Computing Education Whitepaper, President Obama said in his final State of the Union Address, that “helping students learn to write computer code” was among his goals for the year ahead. A growing […]

Graduate students and postdoctoral scholars from institutions in Canada, Europe, Japan and the United States are invited to apply for the seventh International Summer School on HPC Challenges in Computational Sciences, to be held June 26 to July 1, 2016, in Ljubljana, Slovenia. Applications are due Feb. 15. The summer school is sponsored by the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) with funds from the U.S. National Science Foundation, Compute/Calcul Canada, the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE) and the RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science (RIKEN AICS). Leading American, European and Japanese computational scientists and HPC technologists will offer instruction on a variety of topics, including: HPC challenges by […]

Well, that was a whopper! The Washington, DC area received its first blizzard in many years this past weekend. For a city that normally only receives 15.4 inches of snow spread out over an entire season, the two plus feet of snow has been overwhelming for the city. DC is not equipped to handle this amount of snow. But, we were warned. And, for the most part, the weather forecasters were right on target. All thanks to amazing computer models that predicted the storms path and total accumulation with stellar accuracy 8 days before the storm hit the region. This was highlighted by the Washington Post: This forecast success would […]

The Blue Waters Graduate Fellowship Program lets graduate students from across the country immerse themselves in a year of focused high-performance computing (HPC) and data-intensive research using the Blue Waters supercomputer to accelerate their research. This unique program, funded by the National Science Foundation, is designed to support PhD students engaged in a program of study and research that is directly relevant to the use of Blue Waters as the fellowship provides up to 50,000 node-hours on the Blue Waters system. Blue Waters is a truly extraordinary supercomputer used by researchers across the country to gain new understanding of how viruses attack our bodies, the formation of galaxies and of […]

The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), Office of Justice Programs (OJP), National Institute of Justice (NIJ) is seeking applications for funding to conduct research and technology development leading to the introduction into practice of new and innovative tools to: Process large-scale computer networks for digital evidence in a forensically sound manner that preserves the probative value of the evidence that the computer network may contain; Process mobile devices voluntarily surrendered to law enforcement by witnesses or victims of an alleged crime, which will discriminate between data that are germane to that crime and data that are not, and which will only collect data that are germane; or Automatically detect children in […]