![Boston Dynamics robot [credit Boston Dynamics]](http://www.cccblog.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/24bits-robots-hpMedium-220x300.jpeg "Boston Dynamics robot [credit Boston Dynamics]")
Today, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) officially kicked off its newest Grand Challenge, DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC). As we've blogged previously, the Grand Challenge calls for “a humanoid robot (with a bias toward bipedal designs) that can be used in rough terrain and for industrial disasters.” DARPA also released a video of Pet-Proto, a humanoid robot manufactured by Boston Dynamics. ...
This week, the National Science Foundation issued a solicitation for its new Exploiting Parallelism and Scalability (XPS) program. The program aims to support groundbreaking research leading to a new era of scalable computing. NSF estimates that $15 million in awards will be made in FY 2013 for this program. As the solicitation notes, the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) furnished a white ...
![NSF Big Data Award Photo [credit: Thinkstock]](http://www.cccblog.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/big_data_awards_f3-90x90.jpg "NSF Big Data Award Photo [credit: Thinkstock]")
Last week, the National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded $21.6 million to 34 institutions across the country through the foundation's Campus Cyberinfrastructure-Network Infrastructure and Engineering (CC-NIE) program. The projects will seek to improve U.S. University and college computer networks that are necessary for movement of the large data sets required for data-intensive scientific research. The awards to the 34 ...
GNS Healthcare, a healthcare analytics company and Aetna, an American managed health care organization, are collaborating to make use of GNS' supercomputer "REFS" (Reverse Engineering and Forward Simulation). By using predictive analytics with Aetna claims and other health information, the REFS platform will create data models to help the early identification of metabolic syndrome, which ...
![Government Aims to Build a ‘Data Eye in the Sky’ [image courtesy Brian Stauffer via The New York Times].](http://www.cccblog.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/11PRED-popup-90x90.jpeg "Government Aims to Build a ‘Data Eye in the Sky’ [image courtesy Brian Stauffer via The New York Times].")
Nearly a year ago, tech writer John Markoff published a story in The New York Times about Open Source Indicators (OSI), a new program by the Federal government's Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) seeking to automatically collect publicly available data, including Web search queries, blog entries, Internet traffic flows, financial market indicators, traffic webcams, changes in Wikipedia entries, etc., to understand patterns ...
![Workshop on Discovery Informatics [image courtesy Yolanda Gil and Haym Hirsh, http://www.discoveryinformaticsinitiative.org/diw2012].](http://www.cccblog.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/diw-logo-90x90.png "Workshop on Discovery Informatics [image courtesy Yolanda Gil and Haym Hirsh, http://www.discoveryinformaticsinitiative.org/diw2012]."){kind=logo}
This past February in Arlington, VA, Yolanda Gil (University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute) and Haym Hirsh (Rutgers University) co-organized a workshop on discovery informatics, assembling over 50 participants from academia, industry, and government "to investigate the opportunities that scientific discoveries present to information sciences and intelligent systems as a new area of research ...
