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 […]

At a press briefing featuring high-ranking Federal, state, and local officials on its Gaithersburg, MD, campus last month, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) announced a new partnership to establish the National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence, a “public-private collaboration for accelerating the widespread adoption of integrated cybersecurity tools and technologies.” The Center received $10 million in the FY 2012 appropriations to cover startup costs, and expects to make available opportunities for grants to address identified needed technologies. According to the Center website: The Center brings experts together from industry, government and academia under one roof to develop practical, interoperable cybersecurity approaches that address the real world needs of complex […]

Ira “Gus” Hunt, the CIA’s Chief Technology Officer, spoke out about the profound changes caused by information technology in recent years — much of it driven by social, mobile, and cloud applications — at the 1st Annual Emerging Technologies Symposium last month, according to Government Computer News. Noting how the Arab spring uprising “would not have been possible without these technologies,” Hunt described how the CIA is increasingly “embracing big data to dramatically speed up the tie it takes to analyze and act on the sea of data its sensors and agents” are collecting. From the GCN, which wrote about Hunt’s talk at the symposium (after the jump):