The following is a special contribution to this blog by Josep Torrellas, Professor at the Departments of Computer Science and (by courtesy) Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the Director of the Center for Programmable Extreme Scale Computing, and the Director of the Illinois-Intel Parallelism Center (I2PC).  Josep is a member of the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council.  As part of the CCC’s ongoing support of visioning workshops, Alex Jones (University of Pittsburgh), Iris Bahar (Brown University), Srinivas Katkoori (University of South Florida), Patrick Madden (SUNY Binghamton), Diana Marculescu (Carnegie Mellon University), and Igor Markov (University of Michigan) have co-organized three workshops on Charting the Future […]

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has announced three additional funding opportunities focused on training under the Big Data to Knowledge (BD2K) Initiative.  The BD2K Initiative is a new major trans-NIH initiative that aims to support advances in data science, other quantitative sciences, policy, and training that are needed for the effective use of Big Data in biomedical research. The new funding opportunities are: Predoctoral Training in Biomedical Big Data Science: The purpose of this Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) is to solicit applications for graduate training programs in Big Data Science, for the expressed purpose of training the next generation of scientists who will develop computational and quantitative approaches and tools needed by the biomedical research community […]

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has revamped the Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) Program.  It is now called the National Science Foundation Research Traineeship (NRT) Program.  Like IGERT, NRT programs are supposed to develop graduate STEM training programs which will give students the skills, knowledge and competencies needed for a full range of STEM careers.  One key feature of the new program is the specific focus on Data Enabled Science and Engineering.  From the announcement: The NRT program initially has one priority research theme – Data-Enabled Science and Engineering (DESE); in addition, proposals are encouraged on any other crosscutting, interdisciplinary theme. In either case, proposals should identify the alignment of project research […]

The National Science Foundation has issued a new program solicitation for High Performance Computing System Acquisition: Continuing the Building of a More Inclusive Computing Environment for Science and Engineering. “The intent of this solicitation is to request proposals from organizations willing to serve as Resource Providers within the NSF eXtreme Digital (XD) program.  The current solicitation is intended to complement previous NSF investments in advanced computational infrastructure by exploring new and creative approaches to delivering innovative computational resources to an increasingly diverse community and portfolio of scientific research and education.   NSF’s vision for Advanced Computing Infrastructure, which supports Cyberinfrastructure Framework for 21st Century Science and Engineering (CIF21), focuses specifically on ensuring that the science and engineering community has […]

Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council Member Mark Hill was featured by the National Science Foundation (NSF) in their “Discoveries“.  Hill’s work on the efficiencies in computer architecture is described in the article titled Shaving Nanoseconds from Racing Processors. The computer is one of the most complex machines ever devised and most of us only ever interact with its simplest features. For each keystroke and web-click, thousands of instructions must be communicated in diverse machine languages and millions of calculations computed.   Mark Hill knows more about the inner workings of computer hardware than most. As Amdahl Professor of Computer Science at the University of Wisconsin, he studies the way computers transform 0s and 1s into […]

In an article published on The New York Times’ website yesterday, the newspaper’s technology writer Steve Lohr discusses Alex Pentland’s new book, “Social Physics: How Good Ideas Spread – The Lesson From a New Science.” Pentland is the Director of the MIT Human Dynamics Laboratory which pioneered the idea of a society enabled by Big Data. One of the key lessons in his book is that there is a lot of data out there, but not all data is equal. Pentland looks at this as a computational social scientist that researches people through sensors.  He began this type of research long before people carried their own sensors as they do today, in their cellphones. “We understood what cellphones meant,” […]