A great piece about Big Data in today’s New York Times by technology reporter Steve Lohr: GOOD with numbers? Fascinated by data? The sound you hear is opportunity knocking.   Mo Zhou was snapped up by I.B.M. last summer, as a freshly minted Yale M.B.A., to join the technology company’s fast-growing ranks of data consultants. They help businesses make sense of an explosion of data — Web traffic and social network comments, as well as software and sensors that monitor shipments, suppliers and customers — to guide decisions, trim costs and lift sales. “I’ve always had a love of numbers,” says Ms. Zhou, whose job as a data analyst suits her skills.   […]

As part of the Materials Genome Initiative (MGI) announced last summer, the Department of Energy (DoE), through its Basic Energy Sciences (BES) program, this week unveiled a new Predictive Theory and Modeling program, seeking “research [that] could lead to a theory/modeling design paradigm, validated through experiment, [that] could enhance the rate of discovery of new or vastly improved materials, material systems, and chemical processes.” What’s interesting is that this solicitation contains opportunities for computing researchers. According to the announcement: We envision the BES activities will include the development of new software tools and data standards that catalyze a fully integrated approach from material discovery to applications. BES also expects to support research to advance ab-initio methods […]