On Monday, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) announced a Sept. 27 Proposers’ Day for its Foundational Cyberwarfare program, a new initiative that will seek “to create revolutionary technologies for understanding, planning, and managing cyberwarfare in real-time, large-scale, and dynamic network environments.” Codenamed “Plan X,” the initiative will also support “novel research into the nature of cyberwarfare and support development of fundamental strategies and tactics needed to dominate the cyber battlespace.” The Proposers’ Day comes in advance of the formal request for proposals, which is anticipated in late September. According to the notice, “DARPA seeks innovative research in four key areas in support of Plan X” (following the link):

The following is a special contribution to this blog by Will Barkis, Gigabit Developer Evangelist at Mozilla Foundation. As the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) noted back in June, Mozilla and the National Science Foundation (NSF) have teamed up to run an app development challenge to build killer apps on ultra high speed, deeply programmable networks. In particular, this challenge is seeking apps and services that are impossible on today’s networks. The first phase, running through next Thursday, Aug. 23rd, is focused on ideation — and includes $15,000 in prizes for the best ideas. Imagine what you could do in a world where bandwidth, computing capacity, and access to large data sets are unlimited. Imagine if physical […]

Earlier this week, the National Science Foundation (NSF) issued a Dear Colleague Letter (DCL) announcing a new international collaboration in computational neuroscience. Together with France’s Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR), NSF is seeking U.S.-French collaborative research projects that will advance the state of the art in computational neuroscience. The submission deadline is Nov. 2nd. Per the DCL: Rapid advances in empirical methods, together with powerful mathematical and computational techniques, and an unprecedented ability to store and analyze large quantities of data, place computational neuroscience at the threshold of paradigm-shifting discoveries. Computational neuroscience thrives from integrating expertise across multiple disciplines and, therefore, is well suited for funding mechanisms specifically designed to foster […]

“On the Edge — The Future of Computing Research” was the title of a plenary session at the Computing Research Association’s (CRA) biennial Conference at Snowbird last month. And it’s a consistent theme of CRA’s Computing Community Consortium (CCC). Here’s the pitch: Our field has exhibited an ever-changing balance of “technology push” and “demand pull” over the years. Many currently sense a movement of the pendulum in the “demand pull” direction. I’d like to argue that this is fantastic — it’s great news for our field, great news for society, and great news for the future (read more following the link…).

University of Southern California computer scientist and neuroscientist Maja Matarić is the subject of an interview appearing in today’s Nature. On the eve of the release of a new film, Robot and Frank, winner of the annual Sundance Film Festival, Matarić talks about the film and its coverage of assistive robotics — including recent advances for people with disabilities, children with autism, and the elderly. From the Nature piece (following the link):

Several directorates within the National Science Foundation (NSF) — including Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) — issued a Dear Colleague Letter this afternoon calling for proposals relating to the potential threat of debris fields from the March 2011 Japanese earthquake and tsunami upon the West coast of North America: In the aftermath of the March 2011 earthquake and subsequent tsunami in Japan, fields of debris are now washing up on the western shores of the United States. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Japanese authorities say that approximately five million tons of wreckage flowed into the Pacific Ocean following the earthquake and tsunami. While a […]