There’s a great article in this week’s Nature — out this afternoon — featuring computer scientists like Cornell’s Jon Kleinberg, Harvard’s David Lazer (now at Northeastern), and Columbia’s Duncan Watts, who are leveraging today’s digital data streams (e.g., e-mail, social media, mobile devices, etc.) to transform the way we study social science. Here’s an excerpt about their pioneering efforts in computational social science: Jon Kleinberg’s early work was not for the mathematically faint of heart. His first publication1, in 1992, was a computer-science paper with contents as dense as its title: ‘On dynamic Voronoi diagrams and the minimum Hausdorff distance for point sets under Euclidean motion in the plane’.   That was before the World-Wide Web […]

On Monday, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) announced a Sept. 27 Proposers’ Day for its Foundational Cyberwarfare program, a new initiative that will seek “to create revolutionary technologies for understanding, planning, and managing cyberwarfare in real-time, large-scale, and dynamic network environments.” Codenamed “Plan X,” the initiative will also support “novel research into the nature of cyberwarfare and support development of fundamental strategies and tactics needed to dominate the cyber battlespace.” The Proposers’ Day comes in advance of the formal request for proposals, which is anticipated in late September. According to the notice, “DARPA seeks innovative research in four key areas in support of Plan X” (following the link):