The Associated Press and Google have teamed up to create Journalism and Technology Scholarships that foster digital and new media skills in student journalists. The scholarships will provide $20,000 to six promising undergraduate or graduate students pursuing or planning to pursue degrees at the intersection of journalism, computer science and new media during the 2012-2013 academic year. Have you created original journalistic content with computer science elements? Do you have an idea to develop new ways of telling a story with technology? Are you a “techie” who knows how to construct a journalistic story through multimedia? If you’re on the cutting edge of digital media beyond the classroom, this scholarship is for you!   […]

Last week, the National Institutes of Health announced a call for the 2012 Director’s New Innovator (DP2) Award program, an initiative created in 2007 to stimulate highly innovative research and support promising new investigators. Many new investigators have exceptionally innovative research ideas, but not the preliminary data required to fare well in the traditional NIH peer review system. As part of NIH’s commitment to increasing opportunities for new scientists, it has created the NIH Director’s New Innovator Award to support exceptionally creative new investigators who propose highly innovative projects that have the potential for unusually high impact. This award complements ongoing efforts by NIH and its institutes and centers to fund new […]

The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation has just announced a Request for Ideas (RFI) about Data Intensive Science: The increasing volume and complexity of scientific data are overwhelming current research practices, and create additional barriers to an already challenged science infrastructure, workforce and funding landscape. Many agencies and foundations are looking at ways to best combat the growing wave of challenges caused by today’s data deluge, and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation’s RFI on Data Intensive Science is intended to add to this growing body of thinking. This RFI is being conducted in the open and for the benefit of anyone looking to navigate these areas.   We welcome […]

Fresh on the heels of announcing a call for social media research, DARPA’s Information Innovation Office (I2O) has issued a solicitation for “innovative research proposals in the area of automated program analysis for cybersecurity.” From the official broad agency announcement: Automated program analysis is a fundamentally hard problem. It has been known since the work of Church and Turing in 1936 that virtually any interesting question about the properties of programs is undecidable — that is, it is provably impossible to build an automated program analysis tool that will answer any question about cybersecurity for any program and input with complete accuracy…

The following is a special contribution to this blog from Henry Kautz, Chair of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Rochester. His research interests are in knowledge representation, satisfiability testing, pervasive computing, and assistive technology. He is currently President of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). If you have comments on this essay, e-mail Henry or add an entry to the bottom of this blog post. Countless gallons of ink (real and virtual) have been spilled on the need to infuse the humanities into science and engineering education. For example, philosopher Martha Nussbaum’s recent book, Not For Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities, passionately argues that […]

Back in mid-June, we noted the President’s announcement of a $70 million National Robotics Initiative (NRI) — a multi-agency investment spanning the NSF, NIH, NASA, and U.S. Department of Agriculture — to fund major research advances enabling next-generation robotics. This morning, the White House announced that the Department of Defense is now supporting the NRI as well. In a post on the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) Blog, Tom Kalil, OSTP Deputy Director for Policy, and Chuck Thorpe, OSTP Assistant Director for Advanced Manufacturing and Robotics, noted: