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):

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is conducting a Cash for Locating and Identifying Quick Response codes (CLIQR) Quest Challenge, “a prize-based challenge that seeks to advance the understanding of social media and the Internet, and explore the role the Internet and social networking [play] in the timely communication, wide area team-building and urgent mobilization required to solve broad scope, time-critical problems.” The challenge began on Feb. 23rd and runs until 12pm EST on Thursday, March 8th. A cash prize of up to $40,000 will be awarded to the first contest entrant to find and submit all of the QR codes. According to the challenge website:

The National Science Foundation’s (NSF) directorates for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) and Mathematical and Physical Sciences (MPS) have issued a joint solicitation for a CISE-MPS Interdisciplinary Faculty Program in Quantum Information Science. The program seeks to “promote research in the area of Quantum Information Science (QIS) by providing resources [that] allow QIS researchers and researchers from the CISE or MPS disciplines to actively engage in joint research efforts.” A specific goal is to encourage long-term visits by faculty to a host institution. From the solicitation (following the link):

Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Director Regina Dugan recently sat on an panel sponsored by Washington Post Live, the live journalism arm of The Washington Post Co. The panel — titled “Innovation and Ideas” — was part of a special series on American Competitiveness: What Works in which corporate executives, political leaders, economists and other experts charted a path for U.S. competitiveness, describing big obstacles — as well as reasons for optimism. As part of a special section in last week’s Post summarizing the panels, Dugan penned a piece describing her view of ideas and innovation — and touched on a recent breakthrough enabled by advances in computing. Here it is (after the jump):

In recent weeks, open innovation company InnoCentive has launched a pair of competitions with significant R&D questions requiring advances in computing. One is focused on data-driven solutions for enabling “smart systems” in our cities, while the other seeks the development of simple, cost-effective, and consistent tools to improve diagnosis and monitoring of people with Alzheimer’s disease. In conjunction with The Economist, InnoCentive’s smart systems challenge calls for “clever data-driven visualizations that show how improvements to a public utility or infrastructure would improve the health, happiness, safety, aesthetics, etc., of a community” (more following the link).

The Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) has announced plans for its annual Spring Review, featuring work funded by AFOSR over the past year, as well as discussion of trends and plans for future basic research programs of interest to the Air Force. This year’s Spring Review will be held March 5-9 in Arlington, VA. The first two days of the event will be focused on the efforts of the Mathematics, Information, and Life Sciences Directorate, with talks spanning information and complex systems, decision making, and dynamical systems, control, optimization, and computational mathematics. Relevant portions of the schedule appear following the link: