The National Science Foundation (NSF) last week issued a new solicitation for its Secure and Trustworthy Computing (SaTC) program: Cyberspace — a global “virtual” village enabled by hyper-connected digital infrastructures – has transformed the daily lives of people for the better. Families and friends regardless of distance and location can see and talk with one another as if in the same room. Cyber economies create new opportunities. Every sector of the society, every discipline, has been transformed by cyberspace. Today it is no surprise that cyberspace is critical to our national priorities in commerce, education, energy, financial services, healthcare, manufacturing, and defense.   The rush to adopt cyberspace, however, has exposed its fragility. The […]

The Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research (OBSSR) within the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has issued a Request for Information (RFI) announcing its intent to establish a new Mobile Health Public-Private Partnership (mHealth PPP) that would “facilitate research and evidence collection to enable the appropriate use of wireless devices to improve health in both the domestic and global environment” through collaboration among government, academic, non-profit, philanthropic, and private sector organizations. In particular, the RFI seeks to identify organizations that could serve as managing partner and/or participants for the mHealth PPP. According to the RFI (following the link):

Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee of MIT have posted an interesting entry to the Harvard Business Review Blog about big data and corporate management: Big data has the potential to revolutionize management. Simply put, because of big data, managers can measure, and hence know, radically more about their businesses, and directly translate that knowledge into improved decision making and performance. Of course, companies such as Google and Amazon are already doing this. After all, we expect companies that were born digital to accomplish things that business executives could only dream of a generation ago. But in fact the use of big data has the potential to transform traditional businesses as well.   […]

The National Science Foundation (NSF), together with the National Institutes of Health (NIH), NASA, and U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), yesterday issued a new solicitation for the National Robotics Initiative (NRI), seeking small (one or more investigators, funded at a rate of up to $250,000 in direct costs per year for up to five years) and large (multi-disciplinary teams, up to $1 million in direct costs per year for three to five years) proposals that support fundamental research enabling “the realization of co-robots acting in direct support of individuals and groups.” Up to $50 million in funds are available in the coming year. Small proposals are due Dec. 11th; large proposals by Jan. […]

With the start of the 2012-13 school year, the National Science Foundation (NSF) yesterday released the first issue of the second volume of CS Bits & Bytes, focusing on biomimetic robotics, relating optimal control to the 2012 Summer Olympics. The issue highlights the work of Emanuel Todorov’s Movement Control Laboratory at the University of Washington, includes links to related videos, and contains a culminating activity that asks students to define performance metrics for sports, helping them realize all that must go into optimal control and performance. CS Bits & Bytes is a biweekly newsletter developed to make computer science more accessible to educators and learners around the world. Each issue of CS […]

The President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) heard this morning from Susan L. Graham (UC Berkeley and the Computing Community Consortium), Peter Lee (Microsoft Research), and David E. Shaw (D.E. Shaw & Co.), co-chairs of a small PCAST working group assessing the status and direction of the nation’s Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) program. The objectives of the working group, which is producing a short update to the comprehensive report on the NITRD program that PCAST issued in December 2010 as required by law, are three-fold: to understand what has transpired in the nearly two years since the last report (both in terms of policy and technological advances), […]