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 […]

(This entry has been updated. Please scroll down for the latest.) Earlier this afternoon, the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) held the first of two webinars to provide an overview of the various Science, Engineering, and Education for Sustainability (SEES) solicitations in FY 2012 — with a particular focus on the details of interest to the CISE research community. Joined by CISE Deputy Assistant Director Cynthia Dion-Schwarz and Computing and Communications Foundations (CCF) Division Director Susanne Hambrusch, Program Director Krishna Kant noted that “sustainability questions present new and exciting opportunities for CISE research that can at the same time have significant societal impact.” Kant and […]