President Obama has issued an Executive Order establishing the National Strategic Computing Initiative (NSCI), which is an effort to create a cohesive, multi-agency strategic vision, and Federal investment strategy in high-performance computing (HPC). HPC systems, through their high levels of computing power and large amounts of storage capacity, are essential to economic competitiveness, scientific discovery, and national security. The NSCI will ensure that the United States continues leading in this field over the coming decades. As the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology has concluded, high-performance computing “must now assume a broader meaning, encompassing not only flops, but also the ability, for example, to efficiently manipulate vast and rapidly increasing […]

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) Big Data to Knowledge initiative (BD2K) has announced the release of an Request for Applications (RFA) for software and methods development in biomedical big data science: “Big Data to Knowledge (BD2K) Development of Software Tools and Methods for Biomedical Big Data in Targeted Areas of High Need (U01)“. This opportunity targets three topic areas of high need for researchers working with biomedical Big Data: Data privacy is one of the fundamental challenges of our age. To take full advantage of the power of big data to drive biomedical discovery, researchers must work with data from disparate sources and with differing privacy policies and protections. How do we integrate […]

The National Science Foundation is in the middle of a summer-long social media campaign highlighting the #beautyofcomputing. We see beautifully computer-rendered images daily, but we rarely step back to consider the simulation, modeling and visualization technologies behind these images. The #beautyofcomputing campaign highlights these aspects of art, science, and technology and celebrates the aesthetic and creative possibilities of computing, and in particular, the use of computer-rendered images for communicating science. It is easy to take for granted the incredible discoveries made by researchers at institutions around the country, but without funding for computational tools to simulate, analyze and visualize data, many of these discoveries would be impossible. The Computing Community […]

The last President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) meeting was held on Tuesday, July 14th at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, DC. The presentations as well as the webcast videos have all been posted. You can see the full agenda here. Charles Bolden and William Gerstenmaier, Administrator and Associate Administrator, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Garrett Reisman, Director of Crew Operations, SpaceX John Elbon, Vice President and General Manager, Space Exploration, The Boeing Company Gregory Hager, Professor and Former Chair of Computer Science, Johns Hopkins University Seth Sternberg, CEO and Co-Founder, Honor Kai Stinchombe, Founder and CEO, True Link Financial For more information, please see the past […]

The Privacy by Design four workshop series is well underway. With two workshops completed and two to come, the community engagement is high and the interest is continuing to grow. The first workshop, State of Research and Practice, was held in early February and the report can be found here. The second workshop, Privacy Enabling Design, was held in Atlanta, GA in early May. The report has now been released and a number of key insights came out of the two day discussion: Designers lack adequate heuristics to follow when designing applications that may affect users’ privacy. Users want modular privacy for different personal relationships. Designing for trust is a good framework, […]

The following blog post is from Mark Berman, the GENI Project Director.  Submissions invited by August 24, 2015. Over the next two years, the NSF’s Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI) project will transition from a stage of development and deployment managed by the GENI Project Office (GPO) to a phase of continuing operations and support of research innovations under community governance. During the period from Fall 2015 through Fall 2017, the community – to include academia, industry, and government stakeholders, including NSF – will establish governance, administrative, and operations resources and procedures to meet the following goals: Continue and expand GENI’s success as a platform for research and education; Identify […]