(This post has been updated; please scroll down for the latest.) The Obama Administration this morning unveiled details about its Big Data R&D Initiative, committing more than $200 million in new funding through six agencies and departments to improve “our ability to extract knowledge and insights from large and complex collections of digital data.” The effort, spearheaded by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and National Science Foundation (NSF), along with the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Department of Defense (DoD), Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Department of Energy (DoE) Office of Science, and U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), seeks to “advance state-of-the-art core technologies needed to collect, store, preserve, manage, analyze, and share huge quantities of data; harness these technologies to accelerate […]

Updated Thursday, March 29, at 10:55am: OSTP and the agencies have announced the Big Data R&D Initiative. See the latest details here. *** As we noted on Tuesday, the Obama Administration is announcing a new, multi-agency Big Data R&D Initiative today. An event — to be streamed live via the web — is scheduled for 2pm EDT. New York Times’ technology writer Steve Lohr has the early details in today’s paper: The federal government is beginning a major research initiative in big data computing. The effort, which will be announced on Thursday, involves several government agencies and departments, and commitments for the programs total $200 million.   Administration officials compare the initiative to past government research […]

Mario Bergés (CMU) and Computing Innovation Fellow Zico Kolter (MIT) are co-organizing the first International Workshop on Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring, to be held on the campus of Carnegie Mellon University on May 7th. With support from Bosch Research, the workshop will provide a forum to unite researchers working on the topic of energy disaggregation, particularly on sensing and/or algorithms aspects. The workshop will review the main types of approaches that have been explored to date, and discuss possible paths forward. Key foci will include the growing need for standardized datasets and performance metrics that can allow the field to move forward, as well as possible areas of collaboration among research groups from multiple […]

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) today launched a new blog — Tech @ FTC — focused on technology and consumer issues. Through the blog, the FTC aims to provide a vehicle for the agency’s Chief Technologist to communicate about technology issues to both technology experts and the broader public. Ed Felten, on leave from Princeton University (where he’s Professor of Computer Science and Public Affairs) to serve as the first Chief Technologist at the FTC, wrote in his first post: …As the nation’s consumer protection agency, the FTC works on technology issues every day. You’ll see lots of discussion of technology in our reports, cases, speeches and testimonies, not to mention the consumer […]

On Tuesday, the National Institute of Standards and Technology announced a solicitation for proposals that support long-term research in next-generation semiconductor technology, calling the work “critical to the future of the U.S. electronics industry.” Through the solicitation, NIST plans to issue one award of up to $2.6 million in Federal cost-shared funding (a minimum of 25 percent of a project’s budget must come from non-Federal sources) for the project’s first year, with the potential for continued funding for up to five years. Proposals are due by 5pm EDT on Monday, April 16th. According to the solicitation: One area where a clear long-term technological challenge resides is in the development of new […]

Earlier this month, the National Coordination Office (NCO) for the Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) Program — the Federal program that provides a framework and mechanisms for coordination among 15 Federal agencies that support networking and information technology research and development — issued a Call for Papers for the National Symposium on Moving Target Research. This daylong symposium, which comes on the heels of the National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) Trustworthy Cyberspace: Strategic Plan for the Federal Cybersecurity Research and Development Program report published in December, “intends to bring together and publish the work of the Moving Target cybersecurity research community to provide a basis for building on […]