The National Science Foundation (NSF), in partnership with the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), and a consortium of French agencies, has announced a new program under its Science, Engineering, and Education for Sustainability (SEES) initiative focused on the Arctic. This program — dubbed Arctic SEES, or simply ArcSEES — seeks “fundamental research that improves our ability to evaluate the sustainability of the Arctic human-environmental system as well as integrated efforts which will provide community-relevant sustainability pathways and engineering solutions.” As with several SEES solicitations issued in FY 2012, the FY 2013 ArcSEES solicitation offers opportunities for computing researchers. In particular, from the […]

An interesting editorial (subscription required) in this week’s Science magazine, authored by Alan I. Leshner, the Chief Executive Officer of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and Executive Publisher of Science: Postdoctoral (Postdoc) training has become virtually institutionalized in many parts of the world as a discrete stage in the career progression in most science and engineering fields. However, there is far too much variability in what such training involves, across institutions and among the laboratories within them. Given its importance and pervasiveness — there are over 50,000 postdocs in the United States alone — we need to establish and enforce standards, norms, and expectations for mentors, mentees, and their institutions that are […]

The National Science Foundation (NSF) and Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC) have just announced a new joint initiative — Failure-Resistant Systems (FRS) — that seeks to address “compelling research challenges in failure resistant systems that are of paramount importance to industry, academia, and society at large.” According to the solicitation, which spans NSF’s directorates for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) and Engineering (ENG) as well as the SRC (emphasis added): New approaches in the design of electronic circuits and systems are needed for products and services that continue to operate correctly in the presence of transient, permanent, or systematic failures. From large information processing systems supporting communications and computation, to small embedded systems targeting medical and […]

Last October, we noted that NASA had announced plans to run an International Space Apps Challenge in early 2012, bringing together officials from international space agencies, scientists, and citizens in an effort to use publicly-released scientific data to create, build, and invent new solutions that address challenges of global importance, from the impact of weather upon the global economy to the depletion of ocean resources. The effort culminated this past weekend in a 48-hour global event in which over 2,000 participants developed more than 100 unique solutions addressing 71 challenges. According to the International Space Apps Challenge Blog (following the link):

The National Science Foundation (NSF) last week issued a new solicitation under its Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) program, providing a specific track for training the next generation of researchers in computational and data-enabled science and engineering. The solicitation is part of the Foundation’s (and Administration’s) Big Data Initiative, which was announced last month. According to the new solicitation (emphasis added): Building upon the IGERT platform, the purpose of this IGERT solicitation is to support new models in graduate education in which students are engaged in an environment that supports innovation to learn through hands-on experience how their own research may contribute in new ways to benefit society and to learn the processes for the successful […]

Last week, we reported on the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) Robotics Challenge, which will launch this October with a $2 million prize — plus up to $32 million in related R&D work — “to whomever can help push the state-of-the-art in robotics beyond today’s capabilities in support of the [Department of Defense’s’ disaster recovery mission.” Now our colleagues at IEEE’s Spectrum have published a Q&A with the DARPA program manager leading this challenge, Gill Pratt: Q: DARPA funds lots of robotics programs. What’s the goal and focus of this new effort? [more following the link]