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Archive for the ‘conference reports’ category

ARPA-E’s Open Call for “Transformational Energy Technologies”

March 16th, 2012

Earlier this month, the Advanced Projects Research Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) released a $150 million funding opportunity open to all breakthrough energy technologies. Individual awards under the Open FOA will range between $250,000 and $10 million. According to the announcement:

To address the challenges imposed by the rapidly evolving global energy market, ARPA-E seeks to support transformational research in all areas of energy R&D, including resource identification, extraction, transportation and use, and energy generation, storage, transmission and use in both the transportation and stationary power sectors. Areas of research responsive to this FOA include (but are not limited to) electricity generation by both renewable and non-renewable means, electricity transmission, storage, and distribution; energy efficiency for buildings, manufacturing and commerce, and personal use; and all aspects of transportation, including the production and distribution of both renewable and non-renewable fuels, electrification, and energy efficiency in transportation [more after the jump].

» Read more: ARPA-E’s Open Call for “Transformational Energy Technologies”

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Posted in big science, conference reports, policy, research horizons, resources

CIA CTO: “High Noon in the Information Age”

March 5th, 2012

Ira “Gus” Hunt, the CIA’s Chief Technology Officer, spoke out about the profound changes caused by information technology in recent years — much of it driven by social, mobile, and cloud applications — at the 1st Annual Emerging Technologies Symposium last month, according to Government Computer News. Noting how the Arab spring uprising “would not have been possible without these technologies,” Hunt described how the CIA is increasingly “embracing big data to dramatically speed up the tie it takes to analyze and act on the sea of data its sensors and agents” are collecting.

From the GCN, which wrote about Hunt’s talk at the symposium (after the jump):

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Posted in big science, CCC, conference reports, research horizons, resources

Big Data at the AAAS Annual Meeting

February 21st, 2012

Early last Saturday morning, I had the privilege and pleasure of organizing and moderating a symposium at the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s (AAAS) 2012 Annual Meeting in Vancouver. The 90-minute session — titled Data to Knowledge to Action: Computational Science in a Global Knowledge Society – sought to describe how advances in computing research are enabling a “data to knowledge to action” pipeline that is increasingly critical for facilitating a 21st-century global knowledge society. Over 70 people packed into a small room in the Vancouver Convention Center to hear the session’s featured speakers, Eric Horvitz, Peter Stone, and Deborah Estrin (slide shows after the jump).