The U.S. Department of Energy — together with the Government of India — recently established a Joint Clean Energy Research and Development Center (JCERDC) “designed to promote clean energy innovation by teams of scientists and engineers from India and the United States.” DoE is committing $25 million to the Center over the next five years. The first JCERDC solicitation was issued earlier this month, with a focus on three priority areas. At least one of these — building energy efficiency — specifically aligns with computing research: The objective is to contribute to dramatic improvements in the energy efficiency of buildings (commercial or residential) in the United States and India. Recommended topics include: building […]

As part of ScienceLives — an occasional NSF/LiveScience series that “puts scientists under the microscope to figure out what makes them tick” — CCC Council member Frans Kaashoek recently described what motivated him to pursue software systems research as well as the experiences he’s had as a professor at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. It makes for great viewing — especially for students interested in pursuing computing research. Among the questions Frans was asked, “What’s the best piece of advice you ever received?” Do something that you really care about because you’re going to spend a lot of time on it… If you’re not excited about it, it’s not going […]

“How do you get people to buy more? That’s the $1 million question — literally.” RichRelevance and Overstock.com have partnered to offer the first-ever RecLab Prize on Overstock.com — up to $1 million in cash to the person or team capable of building the most powerful online product recommendation engine: The Prize provides a cash award totaling up to $1 million to the researcher or research team who can achieve a measurable lift over existing product recommendations in a wide variety of shopping contexts on Overstock.com. The RecLab Prize rewards the highest performing individual or team based on the results they are able to deliver within a defined judging period (up […]

A number of agencies within the NIH have come together to announce a one-day meeting on “Crowdsourcing: The Art and Science of Open Innovation,” to be held on the NIH grounds in Bethesda, MD, July 18, 2011.  The goal of the meeting is to lay the foundation for running successful challenges in biomedical and health research. Specifically, the meeting will: explore new ways to incentivize innovation in biomedical research with the prize authority recently given to all Federal agencies by Congress. The meeting will focus on the key aspects of this new approach that include: how to identify problems that can be solved through open innovation; how to communicate a scientific […]

The Computing Community Consortium is announcing today a Challenges and Visions Track at the First International Workshop on Managing Interoperability and compleXity in Health Systems (MIX-HS’11), to be held in Glasgow, Scotland, Oct. 28, 2011. MIX-HS’11 will be collocated with the 20th ACM Conference on Information Knowledge and Management. This special MIX-HS’11 track is the latest in a series of “research visions” sessions the CCC is sponsoring at computing research meetings — hoping to provide venues for sharing and discussing forward-looking, visionary ideas for the field, without the constraints of the typical reviewing process. In conjunction with our colleagues at the Mayo Clinic Rochester who are leading the organizing committee — […]

The Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) has announced a new funding opportunity in “transformational computing for aerospace science and engineering” — and particularly high-risk/high-payoff multidisciplinary approaches that may transform computing in the aerospace community. Awards are expected to span up to five years, with an annual investment of $1.5 million. The deadline for receipt of proposals is June 10, 2011. The wide-ranging and highly successful United States Air Force [AF] basic research program that exists today was borne out of the need to address a long standing shortfall in military basic research. While numerous advances have been made over the years, there are still many complex problems confronting the AF in […]