The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) unveiled the DARPA Robotics Challenge yesterday, offering 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.” The challenge seeks the development of “ground robotic capabilities to execute complex tasks in dangerous, degraded, human-engineered environments.” It will launch in October, and DARPA is seeking teams that will compete in challenges involving staged disaster-response scenarios that require “successful navigation of physical tasks corresponding to anticipated, real-world disaster response environments.” According to the Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) (following the link):

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has scheduled two meetings in early May to facilitate strategic planning for its Common Fund, seeking to gather input from the research community that will help inform potential new program ideas. Among the broad themes around which the NIH wishes to center discussion at these “forward focus workshops”: computational and informatics challenges. The Common Fund supports (after the jump):

The Computing Research Association (CRA) today released a report — Computing Degree and Enrollment Trends, 2010-2011 — providing summary data from its annual Taulbee survey of Ph.D.-granting departments in computer science and allied fields in the U.S. and Canada. As posted on CRA’s Policy Blog: Enrollments in undergraduate computer science programs rose 9.6 percent in the 2011-12 school year, the fourth straight year of increase…  

Later today, the Department of Energy (DoE) — together with Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E), Itron, and Gridwise Alliance — will launch the Apps for Energy competition, “challenging developers to use the Green Button data access program to bring residential and commercial utility data to life.” Through the competition, DoE will offer $100,000 in cash prizes to the software developers and designers who submit the best apps, as judged by a panel of government officials, energy industry leaders, and information technology experts (more after the jump).

NPR’s Diane Rehm Show on Monday featured an hour-long discussion among several thought leaders — titled “The New World of Massive Data Mining” — about the Federal government’s new Big Data R&D Initiative: Every time you go on the Internet, make a phone call, send an email, pass a traffic camera or pay a bill, you create [electronic data]. In all, 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created each day. This massive pile of information from all sources is called “Big Data.” It gets stored somewhere, and everyday the pile gets bigger. Government and industry are finding new ways to analyze it. Last week the administration announced an initiative to aid the development of Big Data […]

Our colleagues over at IEEE have published a great piece by G. Pascal Zachary, a professor of practice at Arizona State University, opining on the legacy of recently-departed Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Director Regina Dugan: The most famous name in American innovation today isn’t Apple or Google. Nor is it Facebook, Boeing, or Intel.   The iconic American innovator is a government agency that neither earns a profit nor sells a single consumer product. That DARPA … runs with the big dogs of commercial innovation reflects the importance of science and technology to national security. War, not necessity, is the mother of invention.
..   Since its inception as the Advanced Research Projects Agency in the late […]