Earlier this fall, the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) issued a new solicitation for FY 2012 for its Cyberlearning: Transforming Education program, providing three different research categories of funding. The deadline for the first category — Exploratory Projects — is December 15. From the solicitation: Through the Cyberlearning: Transforming Education program, NSF seeks to integrate advances in technology with advances in what is known about how people learn to:   better understand how people learn with technology and how technology can be used productively to help people learn, through individual use and/or through collaborations mediated by technology; better use technology for collecting, analyzing, sharing, and managing data to […]

Last 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 — Peter Stone, an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin — shares his experiences in the daylong workshop. Scientists and politicians comprise two very different, usually mutually independent cultures.  The analytical mindset that is central to the scientific process is not as pervasive in politics, where compromise and deal-making rule the day. As a result, scientists are often reluctant to engage in […]

The National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Directorates for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE), Engineering (ENG), and Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences (SBE) have joined forces to co-sponsor a new, interdisciplinary Smart Health and Wellbeing (SHB) program for FY 2012. The solicitation just out today broadens a program first implemented by CISE in spring 2011 — and is consistent with an outline in last winter’s President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) report on networking and information technology R&D as well as a prior Computing Community Consortium (CCC) health IT research roadmap: Through the Smart Health and Wellbeing (SHB) Program, NSF seeks to address fundamental technical and scientific issues that would support much needed transformation of healthcare from reactive and hospital-centered […]

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 […]