As we’ve previously reported in this space, the National Science Foundation (NSF) recently issued a series of solicitations as part of its multi-year Science, Engineering, and Education for Sustainability (SEES) initiative. Today the NSF’s CISE Directorate announced that it will be holding a pair of webinars later this month and early next month to provide an overview of these solicitations for researchers — with a particular focus on details that are likely to be of interest to the CISE community: The main purpose of [these webinars] is to help the CISE community to take advantage of the interdisciplinary research funding opportunities for FY 12 in [this] emerging area… Details about the webinars — including instructions for […]

Attendees of the 37th International Conference on Very Large Databases (VLDB 2011) — a premier annual international forum for data management and database researchers, vendors, practitioners, application developers, and users — stretched into the hallway outside the meeting room during the first of two Challenges and Visions sessions held in Seattle, WA, in late August. According to Hank Korth, CCC Council member and liaison to the VLDB program committee, “The talks were fantastic [and the follow-on] questions [were] great.” In keeping with tradition for these CCC-funded sessions, the VLDB Challenges and Visions Track emphasized visionary ideas, long-term challenges, and opportunities in data-centric research outside of the current mainstream topics of the field. […]