As we noted in this space last month, the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) is holding workshops this spring to help young faculty prepare competitive CAREER proposals. Applications for the second workshop — to be held in Tempe, AZ, near the campus of Arizona State University — open today. The deadline to apply is April 23rd, with decisions to be returned within a couple days of that date. According to NSF and the workshop organizers: The workshop intends to provide young faculty members skills in CAREER proposal writing, panel review experience, and opportunities to interact with NSF program directors and recent NSF awardees. The major components of […]

On Feb. 16th, over 150 Federal officials, Congressional staffers, academic researchers, and industry leaders packed a room overlooking the United States Capitol to mark two decades of coordinated Federal investment in networking and information technology research and development with a daylong symposium exploring progress and prospects in the field. Today, I’m delighted to announce that we are launching a new website with complete materials from this extraordinary day — including videos, photos, slides, and written summaries from the 19 15-minute presentations by leaders of the field, plus a luncheon keynote by former Vice President Al Gore, a longtime champion of information technology R&D, and special remarks by former Congressman Tom […]

The Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) has issued a call for 2012 EERE Postdoctoral Research Awards, intended to provide recent Ph.D. recipients with opportunities to conduct research at universities, national laboratories, and other research facilities. This year’s program builds upon 14 inaugural awardees funded in 2011, and includes at least one research topic that requires a strong computer science or software background. The deadline to submit an award application is May 1, 2012. According to the EERE website: The objective of the EERE Postdoctoral Research Awards is to create the next generation of scientific leaders in energy efficiency and renewable energy by attracting the best scientists and engineers […]

The U.S. Department of State has unveiled the Tag Challenge, a “social gaming competition” in which participants will attempt to find five “suspects” as part of a simulated law enforcement search spanning five cities throughout North American and Europe on March 31st. The winning entrant — the first participant or team to successfully locate and photograph all five suspects — will receive a $5,000 cash prize. According to the contest website: Jewel thieves have stolen a prized diamond. Help find them. Win $5,000.   The infamous Panther Five has pulled an audacious new heist: they’ve stolen the world’s 3rd most expensive jewel, the Adly Diamond, from the Overholt Showroom in Washington, DC. […]

Just in time for the kickoff of March Madness later today, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign computer science professor Sheldon Jacobson describes the mathematics behind bracketology — and BracketOdds, a website his research team developed that uses data from 27 past tournaments “to identify a distribution that models the probability of certain seed combinations playing each round of the tournament.” From the interview, posted on UIUC’s website: The tournament is exciting for its upsets and seeming unpredictability. Yet your research has found distinct patterns. How can that help people trying to make sense of it all?   Each game in the tournament can be viewed as a random experiment, with a different […]

The National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC) — the newest of the national synthesis centers funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) focused on fostering synthetic, actionable science related to the structure, functioning, and sustainability of socio-environmental systems — has issued a call for participation in a July workshop on visualization technologies that support research on human-environment interactions. Abstracts are due by April 20th, and travel expenses for lead authors will be covered by SESYNC. According to the call: One of SESYNC’s strategic goals is to foster the development of computational tools and services in support of researchers including scholars studying human-environment interactions.   SESYNC is hosting this workshop to focus especially […]