Social media such as Facebook, Twitter, blogs, wikis, Flickr, and YouTube have garnered a billion users and their popularity is spreading rapidly, particularly on mobile devices. Technology-mediated social participation (TMSP) is a useful term for describing how these social media tools, user-generated content sites, discussion groups, problem reporting, and volunteer systems can be applied to national priorities. Provocative examples suggest transformative applications for healthcare/wellness, disaster response, energy sustainability, cost-effective education, and economic health. Additional new missions for these sociotechnical infrastructures include cultural heritage, political participation, environment/climate protection, public safety, international development, and local civic involvement.

Hands-on, discovery-based, lab experiences are known to be an essential part of middle and high school students’ education in all STEM disciplines, including computing. We tend to think of “labs” as test tubes and beakers, ramps and levers, or frogs and bugs, but in reality they can be defined much more broadly. A lab can be any place where students can explore, experiment, test, design, and get their hands dirty and their minds engaged.

We are embarking on a new era in Defense research. Over the past decade we have seen remarkable progress from the computer science research community spurring growth in the fields of robotics, learning and reasoning, language understanding, collective intelligence and other related technologies.