The NSF’s CISE Directorate, in partnership with the Office of Cyberinfrastructure and other directorates at the Foundation, has announced a call for Software Infrastructure for Sustained Innovation (SI2). In a Dear Colleague Letter issued this week: Software is an integral part of the computational paradigm for supporting innovation and discovery in science and engineering, and is a primary modality for realizing NSF’s Cyberinfrastructure Framework for 21st Century Science and Engineering (CIF21) vision… The crosscutting SI2 program is a long-term investment in this goal of transforming innovations in research and education into sustained software resources that are an integral part of the cyberinfrastructure.   SI2 proposals need to advance scientific research while […]

The following is a special contribution to this blog by Peter Lyster, Program Director for biological modeling and bioinformatics in the Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology at the NIH’s National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS).  Peter describes ways to find and apply for NIH funding opportunities that may well be relevant for computing researchers. The Biomedical Information Science and Technology Initiative (BISTI) is a consortium of representatives from each of the NIH’s institutes and centers that serves as the focus of biomedical computing issues at the NIH.  Established in May 2000, BISTI’s mission is “to make optimal use of computer science and technology to address problems in biology and […]

As part of its mission to help nurture a next generation of computing research leaders, the Computing Community Consortium today announced a call for participants in a first-ever Leadership in Science Policy Institute (LiSPI) — to be held on Monday, November 7, 2011, at the Hyatt Regency Capitol Hill in Washington, DC. The goal of the LiSPI, co-organized by CRA’s Government Affairs Committee, is to educate a small cadre of computing researchers — at the associate professor or higher level — about how science policy is formulated in the U.S. and how our government works.  In particular, the LiSPI will feature presentations and discussions with science policy experts, current and former […]

There’s an interesting article in the March 2011 issue of the Communications of the ACM about “why computer scientists should come out from ‘behind the scenes’ more often and work with the media to draw public attention to their fundamental innovation“ — and just how we can begin to do that: Science communication or public outreach can be seen as taking a lot of time and effort compared to the payoffs it provides. In effect, there’s a tragedy of the commons—we all benefit from those who do it, so there is incentive to let other people shoulder the load.   The rationale behind science communication is fairly obvious, and it is difficult to […]

Last Wednesday, the NSF announced the second round of an international grant competition designed to spur cutting-edge research in the humanities and social sciences.  Called the “Digging into Data Challenge,” the competition specifically promotes large-scale, international and interdisciplinary analysis of large data sets in these fields. The competition asks interested scholars to design methods and tools to analyze large data sets associated with a million books, or a million pages of newspaper, or a million songs, for example. The announcement follows a successful trial round last year amongst teams of humanities experts, social scientists, and computer and information scientists.  This year, a total of 8 research funders are involved, with the […]

As we’ve previously blogged here, the CCC has sponsored three Challenges & Visions Sessions at computing research conferences over the past year, seeking to give time and attention to “wacky ideas” that may not otherwise make it through a conference’s normal reviewing process.  These sessions — run on an experimental basis, to assess their value to the conferences as well as the broader research community — have been quite successful in elevating promising visions and generating vigorous discussions.  Consequently, the CCC is announcing today a call for additional Challenges & Visions Sessions: The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is sponsoring an initiative to bring special “Challenges and Visions” tracks to leading computer […]