Microsoft Research today announced its 2012 Faculty Fellows, recognizing 7 outstanding new faculty members — with diverse research interests spanning robotics, machine learning, human-computer interaction, and social networking, and representing “a selection of the best and brightest in their fields.” Among this year’s Fellows is one of our 2009 Computing Innovation Fellows (CIFellows), Miriah Meyer, who started in the fall as an assistant professor at the University of Utah. According to Microsoft’s announcement: Now in its eighth year, the Microsoft Research Faculty Fellowship program has awarded nearly 50 innovative faculty members in order to stimulate and support creative research undertaken by promising researchers who have the potential to make a profound impact on […]

A little over two years ago, we blogged about the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’s (BLS) biennial employment outlook — a 10-year forecast of job growth in all occupations — noting the prominence of computing in the decade ahead. Well, earlier this year, BLS released a new employment outlook for the period 2010-2020, and computing was once again front and center: Computer and mathematical occupations are projected to add 778,300 new jobs between 2010 and 2020, after having added 229,600 new jobs from 2006 to 2010. This represents 22.0 percent growth from 2010 to 2020…   Employment in the computer systems design and related services industry is projected to add 671,300 jobs, to reach […]

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 […]

The 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 […]

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 […]

From 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]…