(This post has been updated; please scroll down for the latest.) Moments ago at the White House, U.S. Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra, Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) Deputy Director Tom Kalil, Congressman John Yarmouth (D-Ky.), Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, and a bright young 11-year-old from New York City launched Digital Promise — a new national center created by Congress and supported with funds from the Department of Education, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation — to advance technologies to transform learning and education. As part of the announcement, National Science Foundation (NSF) Assistant Director for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Farnam Jahanian, […]

The Chief Information Officers Council (CIOC), working closely with the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), has just launched the Technology Fellows Program “to help the Federal government compete more effectively with the private sector for IT talent” and ultimately “increase the Federal government’s pool of qualified IT professionals.” From the official program announcement: The Chief Information Officers Council is recruiting the nation’s best and brightest IT and computer science professionals for the newly created Technology Fellows Program… aimed at cutting bureaucratic barriers to entering public service and providing access to unique career opportunities in Federal Agencies to highly talented technology professionals.   Through a competitive application process, recent graduates of top […]

The National Science Foundation’s Directorates for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) and Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences (SBE) have issued a joint solicitation for interdisciplinary research and education projects that develop new knowledge at the interface of between computer science and economics & social sciences. From the RFP: An important research interaction has emerged at the interface of computing and economics and social sciences. The synergy between these fields creates a rich opportunity for studying questions that involve interconnected systems with economic and social aspects. This research interaction has already led to the identification of a number of underlying principles and research themes. These include network structures in economic interaction, […]

As we’ve previously reported in this space, the National Science Foundation (NSF) recently issued a series of solicitations as part of its multi-year Science, Engineering, and Education for Sustainability (SEES) initiative. Today the NSF’s CISE Directorate announced that it will be holding a pair of webinars later this month and early next month to provide an overview of these solicitations for researchers — with a particular focus on details that are likely to be of interest to the CISE community: The main purpose of [these webinars] is to help the CISE community to take advantage of the interdisciplinary research funding opportunities for FY 12 in [this] emerging area… Details about the webinars — including instructions for […]

(This post has been updated; please scroll down for the latest.) The NSF’s CISE Directorate has issued a call for white papers for the new US Ignite initiative: The National Science Foundation invites white papers from individuals and organizations (e.g., academic, non-profit, industry, associations, government agencies) that want to express particular interest in the US Ignite initiative — as a partner/resource/infrastructure provider; researcher/innovator for gigabit application development in areas of national priority; or as an entity willing to set up a not-for-profit to govern US Ignite resources in a public-private partnership…

The following is a special contribution to this blog by Doug Fisher, Associate Professor of Computer Science and Computer Engineering at Vanderbilt University. From July 2007 to August 2010, Doug served as a Program Director in the Division of Information and Intelligent Systems (IIS) within NSF’s CISE Directorate. He has agreed to describe something of his life as a NSF PD so that others can judge whether it might be something they would like to try. To contact him, e-mail douglas.h.fisher@vanderbilt.edu. In November 2006, I received a call from a colleague suggesting I apply for a PD opening at NSF. Prior to his call, I had determined to reorient my […]