For those who missed last Tuesday’s webinar about the Core Techniques and Technologies for Advancing Big Data Science and Engineering (BIGDATA) program — the centerpiece of the Administration’s $200 million Big Data R&D Initiative — the National Science Foundation (NSF) and National Institutes of Health (NIH) today announced that they will hold a second webinar next Monday, May 21st at 11am EDT. Registration for the May 21st webinar (click here) will remain open until 11:59pm PDT on Sunday, May 20th. Questions about the solicitation may be e-mailed to bigdata@nsf.gov before or during the webinar. As we’ve reported before, the BIGDATA solicitation aims (following the link):

As part of its recently announced SunShot Initiative — “a collaborative national initiative to make solar energy cost competitive with other forms of energy by the end of the decade” — the Department of Energy’s (DoE) Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) has issued a Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) for “transformational solar technologies and systems utilizing a Plug and Play concept.” In particular, with this FOA, EERE plans to support up to $25 million in research pursuing “radically new designs and frameworks for the next generation of solar panels and photon-to-electron conversion technologies” — and there are key opportunities for computer science. Letters of intent are due to DoE by 5pm […]

Nearly a year ago, the Obama Administration announced a $500 million Advanced Manufacturing Partnership (AMP) to stimulate the development of new technologies to spur high-tech manufacturing. A key focus for the computing research community was a $70 million commitment to research in next-generation robotics. But as we’ve noted previously, another important aspect of the AMP for computer science was the Materials Genome Initiative (MGI), a multi-agency effort “to double the speed with which we discover, develop, and manufacture new materials.” At its core, the MGI sought to “fund computational tools, software, new methods for material characterization, and the development of open standards and databases that will make the process of discovery and development of advanced materials faster, less expensive, and more predictable.” […]

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has announced plans to issue a new Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) titled Deep Exploration and Filtering of Text (DEFT) — a program that will require leveraging advances in machine learning, natural language processing, and computational linguistics “to assist warfighters with planning and decision-making by inferring implicit information in text, filtering redundancy and connecting like documents.” In anticipation of the BAA, DARPA plans to hold a Proposers’ Day this Wednesday, May 16th in Arlington, VA, to familiarize the community with its vision and goals for DEFT. Here’s a description of the DEFT program (following the link):

The organizers of BuildSys 2012 — ACM’s workshop on systems’ issues in the area of building controls, energy management, embedded, and networked sensors — have issued a call for papers. The workshop, which “provides an ideal convergence venue for the Sensor, Building, and Energy research communities to address the research challenges facing the design, deployment, use, and fundamental limits of these systems,” will take place in Toronto on Nov. 6th. Notable about this particular call: to encourage researchers to present truly visionary concepts at the interface between computing and sustainability, the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is sponsoring awards to three Best Paper submissions to the workshop — as it has been doing at a number of research conferences in […]

(This post has been updated; please scroll down for the latest.) Scott Aaronson and Robert Wood, the joint recipients of the 2012 Alan T. Waterman Award, visited the National Science Foundation (NSF) last week. In addition to presenting to the National Science Board (NSB) and chatting with NSF staff, they spent some time describing their research projects and experiences to local high school students, as part of an effort to engage and inspire students’ interest in computer science. Wood visited with about 100 students at Yorktown High School in Arlington, VA, while Aaronson spoke to about 150 students at the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (“TJ”) in Alexandria, VA. At Yorktown, Wood […]