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]  

The National Science Foundation (NSF), through its cross-cutting Science, Engineering, and Education for Sustainability (SEES) initiative and together with the Department of Agriculture (USDA) and Department of Energy (DoE), is seeking proposals for its Earth Systems Modeling (EaSM) program. The goal of EaSM is to foster interdisciplinary efforts aimed at the “development and application of next-generation Earth System Models” that enable a better understanding of climate change, how it is likely to affect the world, and how we can plan for its consequences. Full proposals are due by May 11, 2012. According to the solicitation: This interdisciplinary scientific challenge calls for the development and application of next-generation Earth System Models that include coupled and interactive […]

At an event at the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation (ITIF) in downtown Washington yesterday, White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) Deputy Director for Policy Tom Kalil expanded upon a blog post earlier this week describing the Administration’s keen interest in Grand Challenges — “ambitious yet achievable goals that capture the public’s imagination and that require innovation and breakthroughs in science and technology” as he called them. Kalil led off by describing past successes in science and technology enabled through the pursuit of Grand Challenges, from President Kennedy’s call to put a man on the moon to the Human Genome Project. He highlighted the decentralized, bottom-up efforts that have been exemplars recently, such as Jimmy Wales’ mission […]