Aiming to make the most of the explosion of Big Data and the tools needed to analyze it, the Obama Administration announced a "National Big Data Research and Development Initiative" on March 29, 2012. To launch the initiative, six Federal departments and agencies announced more than $200 million in new commitments that, together, promise to greatly improve and develop the tools, techniques, and human capital needed to move from data to knowledge to action. The Administration is also working to "liberate" government data and voluntarily-contributed corporate data to fuel entrepreneurship, create jobs, and improve the lives of Americans in tangible ways... more

To fully realize the many benefits of High End Computing, the HEC community must address a lack of necessary skills in the workforce. Distinct challenges for the development of a workforce that is prepared for the evolving HEC field include that: 1) such a workforce needs to have multidisciplinary knowledge spanning areas of computer sciences and other areas of science and engineering; and 2) developing such workforce requires change of the workforce development paradigm to one that bridges academic education, which typically provides little access to HEC platforms, with real-world exploitation of HEC systems. 

The NITRD High End Computing Interagency Working Group (HEC-IWG) believes it is critical for the development of meaningful workforce development and education programs that our community identify the specific computational skills needed all along the spectrum from HEC Consumers to HEC Providers to ensure successful exploitation of HEC capabilities. Identifying a representative set of career paths within HEC (computer architect, systems administrator, systems software developer, application developer, computational scientist, etc.), as well as the skills and experiences required to successfully pursue those career paths, will facilitate the development of effective workforce development and education programs and encourage recruitment and in-career transitions. 

The HEC-IWG developed the following position paper, which includes a focus on internships, scholarships, graduate and post-doctoral fellowships, and directly-funded research experience for those in traditional undergraduate and graduate university programs, as well as curriculum development, to develop a robust university environment that produces the workforce ready to apply HEC to problems of US interest. The HEC-IWG approach also includes explicit support for in-career professionals, who may be best served by new, more flexible learning approaches.

Anne Altman, a general manager at International Business Machines Corp., Stefan Groschupf, co-founder and chief executive officer of Datameer Inc., Colin Mahony, senior vice president at Vertica, a unit of Hewlett-Packard Co., and George Strawn, a director at the National Coordination Office, participate in a panel discussion about opportunities in so-called big data services. Bloomberg's Michael Nelson moderates the panel at the Bloomberg Link Big Data Conference in Washington. (Source: Bloomberg)

http://www.bloomberg.com/video/altman-groschupf-mahony-strawn-big-data-value-YIifIV~KRcCmDxtZqd891A.html

Deadline for comments is April 8, 2013.
 

SUBJECT: Increasing Access to the Results of Federally Funded Scientific Research

OSTP Director John Holdren directs Federal agencies with more than $100M in R&D expenditures to develop plans to make the published results of federally funded research freely available to the public within one year of publication and requiring researchers to better account for and manage the digital data resulting from federally funded scientific research

White House Blog: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2013/02/22/expanding-public-access-results-federally-funded-research

To see the new policy memorandum, please visit: http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/microsites/ostp/ostp_public_access_memo_2013.pdf

SEI Blog: Looking Ahead: The SEI Technical Strategic Plan

By Bill Scherlis

SEI Principal Researcher and Director, Institute for Software Research

"The Department of Defense (DoD) has become deeply reliant on software. As a federally funded research and development center (FFRDC), the SEI is chartered to work with the DoD to meet the challenges of designing, producing, assuring, and evolving software-reliant systems in an affordable and dependable manner. This blog post is the second in a multi-part series that describes key elements of our forthcoming Strategic Research Plan that address these challenges through research, acquisition support, and collaboration with the DoD, other federal agencies, industry, and academia. The first post in this series focused on Architecture-Led Incremental Iterative Development. This part focuses on the remaining three elements of our strategic plan: (1) designed-in security and quality (evidence-based software assurance), (2) a set of DoD critical component capabilities relating to cyber-physical systems (CPS), autonomous systems, and big data analytics, and (3) cybersecurity tradecraft and analytics."

White House Blog post

Full PCAST Report

In October 2012, the AAAS Council elected 701 members as Fellows of AAAS. These individuals will be recognized for their contributions to science and technology at the Fellows Forum to be held on 16 February 2013 during the AAAS Annual Meeting in Boston, Massachusetts. The new Fellows will receive a certificate and a blue and gold rosette as a symbol of their distinguished accomplishments. http://www.aaas.org/aboutaaas/fellows/2012.shtml

More at: http://www.nsa.gov/public_info/press_room/2012/cybersecurity_paper.shtml

Submissions are due by January 31, 2013.

Visit http://www.nro.gov for more information.

The Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) Program 2012 Strategic Plan

In an effort to advance the impact of the The Federal Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) Education Portfolio produced by the NSTC, the NCO has setup a STEM Inventory Portal. This portal, empowered by the Federal STEM education inventory dataset, will hopefully prove useful for government, academic, and industry researchers as a tool to look at existing Federal agency's STEM programs, initiatives, investments and more.

The Federal STEM education inventory dataset can be downloaded directly from the whitehouse.gov website: http://www.whitehouse.gov/administration/eop/ostp/nstc/committees/costem

Designed for the purposes of information exchange, it is our hope that this will prove useful for government, academic, and industry researchers in need of spectrum testing facilities.

We invite you to contribute information on testing facilities that are not currently listed, and that are available for use. Please contact wigen@nitrd.gov for more information.

The NITRD Dashboard helps interested individuals better track funding trends and identify agencies with investments in technical areas of interest, which will enable entrepreneurs and grant seekers to better direct their efforts to engage the correct Federal agency.

The data sources driving the NITRD Dashboard are the Agency NITRD Budget Cross Cuts as reported in the NITRD Supplement to the President’s Budget. All data sources are available for download at http://www.nitrd.gov/open