Tag Archive: NSF CISE
Information from the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Directorate for Computer & Information Science (CISE).
The National Science Foundation (NSF) has announced that Farnam Jahanian, professor and chair of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan, will become the new head of its Computer & Information Science & Engineering (CISE) directorate on February 1, 2011.
Good news: Funding opportunities for the CISE community are plentiful. We are in the middle of fiscal year 2010, and last month the President presented his fiscal year 2011 budget to Congress.
Just what are some of our new Administration’s priorities in science, engineering, and technology research and education? And what implications do these priorities have for the computing community, for CISE, and for NSF?
CISE welcomes the following new program directors who joined us since March 2009
Computing innovations drive our economy, underlie scientific advances, change societal behavior, and support national security. Tomorrow’s innovations rely on today’s students. To sustain progress, we need a continuous supply of creative and highly trained computer science researchers, a diverse well-trained computing workforce, and an educated, IT-literate citizenry. So, how are we doing?
Autonomous cars. Robots at work, at play, at home. Intelligent, energy-efficient, earthquake-proof buildings. Physical infrastructure monitored and controlled by sensor nets. Embedded medical devices. Unobtrusive assistive technology. What is common to these systems? They have a computational core that interacts with the physical world.
This is the second in a series of columns by Jeanette Wing, Assistant Director of NSF for CISE, covering items of interest from the directorate.
Imagine a world where computers are everywhere—we use them everywhere, but we see them nowhere because they are either invisible to the naked eye or so visible they are taken for granted. Ubiquitous computing has been a dream since the late 1980s and is a reality today—to a degree. Looking ahead, computing will become even more ubiquitous along many dimensions, and for each dimension, at multiple scales.
We are pleased to introduce CISE Bytes, the first in a series of columns from Jeannette Wing, Assistant Director of NSF for CISE. They will provide brief items of interest about the people in CISE and activities within the directorate.
I have some exciting news to share with all of you: NSF is partnering with Google and IBM to explore data-intensive computing. Through NSF’s reach, Google and IBM are providing software and services running on a large cluster to the broad academic community to explore innovative research and education ideas in data-intensive computing. Google and IBM launched the Academic Cluster Computing Initiative last October with instructional programs at six pilot universities, and the NSF will be joining this initiative as the first research-oriented pilot partner. We are calling the NSF program to provide access to these types of resources the Cluster Exploratory (CluE).
In answering “What is computable?” we must consider the underlying machine, abstract or physical, that is the computer. Consider the Internet as a computer. Now ask “What is computable?” Consider a molecular computer, a DNA computer, or even a quantum computer. If those kinds of computers are not mind-bending enough for you, consider a human and a machine working together as a single computer to solve problems that neither can solve alone. Now ask “What is computable?”
