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 […]

In cooperation with the International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS), the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is pleased to invite submissions to a Challenges and Visions Track at AAMAS 2013, to be held in St. Paul, Minnesota, May 6-10, 2013. The emphasis of this track is on visionary ideas, long-term challenges, and new research opportunities that are outside the current mainstream of the field. In this way, this track will serve as an incubator for innovative approaches, risky and provocative ideas, and to propose challenges and opportunities for the field in the near future.

Judea Pearl received the 2011 ACM A. M. Turing Award “for fundamental contributions to artificial intelligence through the development of a calculus for probabilistic and causal reasoning.” In this guest post, Douglas Fisher, associate professor of computer science and computer engineering at Vanderbilt, summarizes Pearl’s Turing Award Lecture, delivered at last week’s AAAI Conference. Professor Pearl delivered his Turing Award Lecture as the opening invited address at the 26th AAAI Conference in Toronto, Canada, last week. He opened by acknowledging the support of the AAAI community in a great collaborative enterprise, a remarkable “journey” as he said, and he shared the award with the community and his coauthors. He also cited […]