On Monday, the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) — together with the Computing Research Association’s (CRA) Government Affairs Committee — ran its first-ever Leadership in Science Policy Institute (LiSPI). Thirty-five computing researchers from around the country came to Washington to learn about U.S. science policy. Here, one of the participants — Beki Grinter, an Associate Professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech — shares her experiences in the daylong workshop. This past Monday I participated in the first CCC/CRA Leadership in Science Policy Institute in Washington, DC. The day was broken out into different sessions focused on how the Federal budgeting process works, how to connect to agencies like the Department of Energy, the National Institutes of […]

At 11am EST today, key officials from the National Science Foundation (NSF), led by NSF Director Subra Suresh, will present a live webcast about the Foundation’s new Creative Research Awards for Transformative Interdisciplinary Ventures (CREATIV) — a “pilot grant mechanism under the Integrated NSF Support Promoting Interdisciplinary Research and Education (INSPIRE) initiative, to support bold interdisciplinary projects in all NSF-supported areas of science, engineering, and education research.” The goals of the CREATIV grant mechanism are to create new interdisciplinary opportunities that are not perceived to exist presently; attract unusually creative high-risk/high-reward interdisciplinary proposals; and provide substantial funding, not limited to the exploratory stage of the pursuit of novel ideas. Importantly, CREATIV […]

That’s the question being posed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which recently announced the DARPA Shredder Challenge — a competition for computer scientists and puzzle enthusiasts alike to piece together a series of shredded documents. The goal is “to identify and assess potential capabilities that could be used by our warfighters operating in war zones, but might also create vulnerabilities to sensitive information that is protected through our own shredding practices throughout the U.S. national security community.” DARPA will award one cash prize of up to $50,000. As Dan Kauffman, Director of DARPA’s Information Innovation Office (I2O), noted in announcing the Challenge: “The ability to reconstruct shredded documents will potentially yield information […]

Back in June, the Administration announced a $500 million Advanced Manufacturing Partnership (AMP) to stimulate the development of new technologies to spur high-tech manufacturing. A key focus was a $70 million commitment to research in next-generation robotics. But there’s another component of the AMP that also warrants some of our attention: called the Materials Genome Initiative (MGI), it’s a multi-agency effort “to double the speed with which we discover, develop, and manufacture new materials.” And as the Administration noted in June, the MGI seeks to “fund computational tools, software, new methods for material characterization, and the development of open standards and databases that will make the process of discovery and development of advanced materials […]

During a webinar earlier this afternoon, the National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI) — spanning 25 Federal agencies engaged in nanotechnology research — released its 2011 Environmental, Health, and Safety (EHS) Research Strategy, “a comprehensive, integrated approach to produce the research data that will ensure the safe, effective, and responsible development and use of nanotechnology” in the coming years. The EHS Research Strategy, which updates a 2008 version, summarizes the current state of nano science and provides guidance to agencies as they develop their agency-specific EHS research programs. Importantly, for the first time, the research strategy includes a core area of research in predictive modeling and informatics — at the same level as nanomaterial measurement, human exposure […]

Editor’s note: As we’ve previously noted in this space (see here and here), the National Science Foundation (NSF) is soliciting applications for its 2012 East Asia and Pacific Summer Institutes for U.S. Graduate Students (EAPSI). Shwetak Patel — an Assistant Professor of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington who was recently named a MacArthur Fellowship — participated in the 2005 EAPSI program, visiting Jun Rekimoto at the Sony Computer Science Laboratories (CSL), while a Ph.D. student at Georgia Tech. Here Shwetak describes his experiences — and encourages others in computer science (and related fields) to apply. One of my most exciting internship experiences came in 2005 as a part of the NSF EASPI program. Through […]