The National Science Foundation (NSF) has opened the application for the 2014 Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP).  These Fellowships give 3 years of funding to students in research based science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) master’s and doctoral programs. This fellowship is the oldest of it’s kind and considered very prestigious.  What is unique about this fellowship from other NSF awards is that the funds are awarded to the student, not the Principal Investigator.  This helps to ensure that the student can use the funds towards their graduate education in the way they deem best for their personal interests. The Computer & Information Science & Engineering (CISE) Directorate at NSF […]

The White House has been hosting a series of Google+ hangouts called “We the Geeks” that highlight the future of scientific innovation in the United States.  The next hangout will focus on Robots, scheduled for Friday, August 9, 2013 at 2pm EDT.  From the White House: You’ll meet American inventors giving robots incredible new capabilities in manufacturing and medicine. You’ll also hear how the Obama Administration’s National Robotics Initiative is accelerating innovations that will expand the horizons of human capacity and potentially add over $100 billion to the American economy in the next decade. The Hangout will be moderated by Vijay Kumar, Assistant Director for Robotics and Cyberphysical Systems, and Tom Kalil, Deputy Director for Technology and Innovation […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) has a website for Computer Science Undergraduate Research and Graduate Education (CS URGE), which can be found here.  You will find explanations, resources, summer research opportunities and more, targeted at undergraduate computer science students. One of the opportunities highlighted on the Summer Research Opportunities page is The Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science’s, Office of Workforce Development for Teachers and Scientists (WDTS) Science Undergraduate Laboratory Internship (SULI) program.  In this program, students perform research under the guidance of laboratory staff scientists or engineers.  In addition to their summer opportunities, SULI also offers 16-week lab research experiences in DOE labs during the school year.  Applications […]

Chris Isidore of CNN Money, wrote on July 29 about Amazon’s announcement to hire 7,000 new employees, 5,000 of which are for their nationwide distribution centers in an article titled Amazon hiring 7,000 workers.  Last week, the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers – Robotics & Automation Society (IEEE-RAS) held a briefing for the Robotics Caucus on Robots & Job Creation.  Read further to understand how Amazon’s hiring and the briefing are related. Raj Madhavan , Vice President of the Industrial Activities Board of IEEE-RAS, opened the session by asking questions on how best to use robotics.  He then turned the microphone over to Jeff Burnstein, President of the Association for […]

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has announced the Centers of Excellence for Big Data Computing in the Biomedical Sciences (U54) funding opportunity announcement, the first in its Big Data to Knowledge (BD2K) Initiative. The purpose of the BD2K initiative is to help biomedical scientists fully utilize Big Data being generated by research communities. As technology advances, scientists are generating and using large, complex, and diverse datasets, which is making the  biomedical research enterprise more  data-intensive and data-driven. According to the BD2K website: “BD2K Centers of Excellence will address these issues by developing new approaches, methods, software, tools, and related resources and by providing training to advance Big Data science in the context of biomedical […]