The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) has developed a new website for undergraduates seeking summer research opportunities as well as advice and tips on applying for graduate school. The website is called CS URGE (CS Undergraduate Research and Graduate Education), and the URL is http://cra.org/ccc/csurge. We URGE you to promote CS URGE with your students and place a link to the site from your departmental website. In addition to sections on “What is CS Research” and “Why Go to Graduate School?”, the site contains links to many undergraduate summer research programs (e.g., NSF REU, CRA-W, and many others) as well as a free service where researchers can post summer research opportunities […]

From Google’s Research Blog this afternoon: Human language is both rich and ambiguous. When we hear or read words, we resolve meanings to mental representations, for example recognizing and linking names to the intended persons, locations or organizations. Bridging words and meaning — from turning search queries into relevant results to suggesting targeted keywords for advertisers — is also Google’s core competency, and important for many other tasks in information retrieval and natural language processing. We are happy to release a resource, spanning 7,560,141 concepts and 175,100,788 unique text strings, that we hope will help everyone working in these areas [more after the jump]…  

At last week’s meeting of the Advisory Committee (AC) for the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE), Computer and Network Systems (CNS) Division Director Keith Marzullo delivered a presentation summarizing the Foundation’s research infrastructure programs, notably the Foundation-wide Major Research Infrastructure (MRI) program and CISE-specific Computing Research Infrastructure (CRI) program. Marzullo’s talk, and the ensuing discussion, served to illustrate that both initiatives constitute great opportunities for the CISE research community. According to the solicitations: The Major Research Instrumentation Program (MRI) serves to increase access to shared scientific and engineering instruments for research and research training in our Nation’s institutions of higher education, museums, science centers, and not-for-profit organizations… To accomplish these […]

The organizers for this year’s second KDD workshop on Data Mining Applications in Sustainability (SustKDD 2012) have issued a call for papers. The workshop seeks to bring together researchers working on applications of Knowledge Discovery and Data-mining (KDD) to sustainability in diverse areas, especially in infrastructures such as IT, Smart Grids, water, and transportation. From the call for papers (following the link):

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 […]