The New York Times has posted an interesting story to its website this evening — authored by John Markoff — describing researchers’ access to personal data collected by companies: When scientists publish their research, they also make the underlying data available so the results can be verified by other scientists. At least that is how the system is supposed to work. But lately social scientists have come up against an exception that is, true to its name, huge. It is “big data,” the vast sets of information gathered by researchers at companies like Facebook, Google and Microsoft from patterns of cellphone calls, text messages and Internet clicks by millions of users around the world. Companies often refuse to make such […]
Computing Community Consortium Blog
The goal of the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is to catalyze the computing research community to debate longer range, more audacious research challenges; to build consensus around research visions; to evolve the most promising visions toward clearly defined initiatives; and to work with the funding organizations to move challenges and visions toward funding initiatives. The purpose of this blog is to provide a more immediate, online mechanism for dissemination of visioning concepts and community discussion/debate about them.
“Troves of Personal Data, Forbidden to Researchers”
May 21st, 2012 / in policy, Research News / by Erwin GianchandaniCS URGE: A Resource for Undergraduates
May 21st, 2012 / in CS education, pipeline, resources / by Erwin GianchandaniThe Computing Community Consortium (CCC) has developed a new website for undergraduates seeking summer research opportunities as well as advice and tips on applying for graduate school. The website is called CS URGE (CS Undergraduate Research and Graduate Education), and the URL is http://cra.org/ccc/csurge. We URGE you to promote CS URGE with your students and place a link to the site from your departmental website. In addition to sections on “What is CS Research” and “Why Go to Graduate School?”, the site contains links to many undergraduate summer research programs (e.g., NSF REU, CRA-W, and many others) as well as a free service where researchers can post summer research opportunities […]
Emergency Management:
Incident, Resource, and Supply Chain Management
May 20th, 2012 /
in research horizons, workshop reports /
by
Erwin Gianchandani
The following is a special contribution to this blog from Nabil R. Adam, a professor of computer and information systems and director of the recently-established information Technology for Emergency mAnageMent (i-TEAM) Research Laboratory at Rutgers University. Nabil has been on leave as a fellow at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Science and Technology Directorate for the last four years, and in June 2010, he organized and ran a workshop focused on emergency management. Here Nabil summarizes the workshop and some of the key themes that emerged. The Department of Homeland Security recently hosted a workshop titled “Emergency Management: Incident, Resource, and Supply Chain Management” at the University of California-Irvine’s […]
Google Releases Data Set for Research
May 18th, 2012 / in research horizons, Research News, resources / by Erwin GianchandaniFrom Google’s Research Blog this afternoon: Human language is both rich and ambiguous. When we hear or read words, we resolve meanings to mental representations, for example recognizing and linking names to the intended persons, locations or organizations. Bridging words and meaning — from turning search queries into relevant results to suggesting targeted keywords for advertisers — is also Google’s core competency, and important for many other tasks in information retrieval and natural language processing. We are happy to release a resource, spanning 7,560,141 concepts and 175,100,788 unique text strings, that we hope will help everyone working in these areas [more after the jump]…
Funding Research Infrastructure for the CISE Community
May 18th, 2012 / in resources / by Erwin GianchandaniAt last week’s meeting of the Advisory Committee (AC) for the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE), Computer and Network Systems (CNS) Division Director Keith Marzullo delivered a presentation summarizing the Foundation’s research infrastructure programs, notably the Foundation-wide Major Research Infrastructure (MRI) program and CISE-specific Computing Research Infrastructure (CRI) program. Marzullo’s talk, and the ensuing discussion, served to illustrate that both initiatives constitute great opportunities for the CISE research community. According to the solicitations: The Major Research Instrumentation Program (MRI) serves to increase access to shared scientific and engineering instruments for research and research training in our Nation’s institutions of higher education, museums, science centers, and not-for-profit organizations… To accomplish these […]
DoD Announces Robotics Grants
May 17th, 2012 / in big science, research horizons, Research News / by Erwin GianchandaniLast fall, the Department of Defense (DoD) issued a Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) for its Defense University Research Instrumentation Program (DURIP), which “augments current university capabilities or develops new university capabilities to perform cutting-edge defense research.” At the time, the BAA specifically encouraged proposals “for instrumentation supporting research in robotics.” Today, the DoD is announcing the results of the competition — $54.7 million in awards to purchase state-of-the-art research equipment — and at least a dozen of these awards involve robotics research. According to the DoD press release (following the link):
