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), […]

Moments ago, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) of the National Academies released what promises to become a landmark study — Best Care at Lower Cost: The Path to Continuously Learning Health Care in America — comprehensively laying the foundation for a learning health care system that links personal and population data to researchers, practitioners, and patients, thereby “dramatically enhancing the knowledge base on effectiveness of interventions and providing real-time guidance for superior care in treating and preventing illness.” The report presents “a vision of what is possible if the nation applies the resources and tools at hand by marshaling science, information technology, incentives, and care culture to transform effectiveness and efficacy of care.” What’s most […]

The Bay Area Council Economic Institute (BACEI) is out with a new report that integrates data from multiple sources, including the biennial Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) numbers we featured here several months ago, and presents a revealing county-by-county portrait illustrating where within the U.S. high-tech jobs are found. And the result is quite striking: it’s not just in Silicon Valley, but rather in communities all across the country where there have recently been increases of more than 10 percent in high-tech employment. Here are some of the takeaways the BACEI highlighted in its report:

The National Science Foundation (NSF), together with the United States-Israel Binational Science Foundation (BSF), today announced the U.S.-Israel Collaboration in Computer Science (USICCS), which seeks to support collaborative research projects that “develop new knowledge” in foundational areas of computer science, including the theory of computing and the foundations of software design and systems. In particular, through this program, “U.S.-based researchers will receive funds from NSF to support travel to Israel to interact with their Israeli counterparts.” Proposals are due by Feb. 1, 2013. According to the solicitation (following the link):

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has issued a solicitation for its Science, Engineering, and Education for Sustainability (SEES) Fellows program, paving the way for funding a second cohort of recent Ph.D.s who wish to pursue interdisciplinary research and education spanning sustainability science and engineering. The program seeks “to advance science, engineering, and education to inform the societal actions needed for environmental and economic sustainability and sustainable human well-being while creating the necessary workforce to address these challenges.” In particular: The program’s emphasis is to facilitate investigations that cross traditional disciplinary boundaries and address issues of sustainability through a systems approach, building bridges between academic inquiry, economic growth, and societal needs. The Fellow’s […]