Colby Nolasco says he heard about University of Cincinnati’s Early Information Technology program during his sophomore year of high school, in math class.
His interest piqued when the presenter said he could learn how to code his own video games.
“Yeah, sure, why not?” Nolasco says he thought at the time.
He opted into the program and started taking IT classes his junior year, earning the credits equivalent to one year of college by the time he graduated from Lebanon High School in spring 2020. Ten of his classmates did the same.
The 2021 ACM SIGMOD Systems Award represents the work and contributions of many individuals associated with SDSS, including a large number of people representing many areas of Fermilab, such as the Accelerator Division, Applied Physics and Superconducting Technology Division, Finance, Particle Physics Division, Core and Scientific Computing Divisions, WDRS and Directorate.
On a more somber note, one of the SDSS co-recipients did not live to see the award. Jan Vandenberg passed away May 2021. He was a computer scientist and system architect for all of the computing systems and web hosting services used at Johns Hopkins University for the SDSS project. He designed and maintained the systems used to support the development and commissioning of the CAS.
All award recipients received a plaque, as well as a $5,000 honorarium to be shared collectively. They all agreed to send the honorarium to the Vandenberg family.
UCLA Extension, which provides continuing and professional education courses, Monday announced it has received nearly $3 million to fund a new initiative offering low- or no-cost professional certificates to adults from underrepresented and underserved communities.
The UCLAxCareerBridge program will offer a total of $2.9 million in grants for UCLA Extension programs in substance abuse counseling, data science and early childhood education.
UCLA Extension noted that each program has projected job growth, with the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projecting 23% job growth for substance abuse counselors from 2020 to 2030, 28% for data scientists through 2025, and 18% for early childhood assistant teacher jobs through 2030.
Stony Brook University professor Peng Zhang, a SUNY Empire Innovation professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, is leading a statewide team of collaborators in developing “AI-Grid,” an artificial intelligence-enabled, autonomous grid designed to keep power infrastructure resilient from cyberattacks, faults and disastrous accidents.
The work is part of the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Convergence Accelerator Program, which supports and builds upon basic research and discovery that involves multidisciplinary work to accelerate solutions toward societal impact.
In September 2020, the program launched the 2020 cohort, which included AI-Grid as a phase 1 awardee and grant funding of a $1 million to further AI-Grid research from an idea to a low-fidelity prototype. The Convergence Accelerator recently selected teams for phase 2, to focus on expanding the solution prototype and to build a sustainability plan beyond the NSF funding. Under phase 2, a new $5 million NSF cooperative agreement will fund the AI-Grid project.
“This is a game-changing moment for us as an institution,” Chancellor Andrew Martin said. The gains will bolster academic initiatives and student financial support, he said.
U.S. college endowments are expected to post outsize returns for the period after domestic stocks reached record highs and private equity and venture capital investments paid off. Endowments increased a median 27% in the period, the most since 1986, according to Wilshire Trust Universe Comparison Service data. The S&P 500 advanced 41%, with dividends reinvested.
Washington University’s global equity portfolio gained 71.5% and its buyout, venture capital, distressed debt and growth equity investments rose 82%, Chief Investment Officer Scott Wilson said in an interview.
The Institute for Computational and Data Sciences (ICDS), in partnership with four academic colleges — the College of Agricultural Sciences, the College of Information Sciences and Technology, the College of Engineering and the Eberly College of Science — will sponsor four co-funded faculty positions focused on the development of novel methods or advanced applications in data science.
These new ICDS faculty co-hires build on Penn State’s position as a leader in data science, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML).
“Research interests of these co-hired faculty will be focused on investigations that can lead to real-world benefits, such as improving health, securing our food supply, making science and research more efficient and designing vehicles that will take us out of this world,” said Jenni Evans, professor of meteorology and atmospheric science and director of the Institute for Computational and Data Sciences. “
The University of Massachusetts Amherst will continue to play a lead role in protecting the nation’s computing networks and infrastructure through a $4.4 million federal grant to educate cybersecurity researchers and professionals and then place them in jobs throughout the federal government. The program provides generous financial support to help students launch their careers.
The university’s Cybersecurity Institute has secured a renewal of its CyberCorps Scholarship for Service (SFS) program, sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF). A team of cybersecurity researchers, led by the College of Information and Computer Science’s (CICS) Brian Levine, has received the five-year grant to continue the institute’s participation in the CyberCorps program, which began in 2015. Levine’s co-investigators include Marc Liberatore (CICS), as well as co-investigators Dan Holcomb and Wayne Burleson, both of the electrical and computer engineering department in the College of Engineering.
One of the main focuses in expanding the computer science program is further developing the school’s cyberphysical curriculum. Vanderbilt offers one of the world’s top cyberphysical programs, according to the school’s computer science department chair Xenofon Koutsoukos. Cyberphysical technology is a branch of computer science that deals with unconventional computers. For example, stoplights, automated doors, microwaves and countless other devices all have computers integrated into their design; however, they are not typically thought of in the conversation of computer science, Koutsoukos said.
“98 percent of all devices that have computers inside them are not traditional computers,” he said.
As technology advances across all industries and sectors, cyberphysical knowledge and skills are becoming increasingly important to tech companies and employers recruiting new talent, he added. Carnegie Mellon, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of California and Stanford are the program’s only true competitors within this arena, according to Fauchet.
The Brookings Institution, Brian Fowler and Emiliana Vargas
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Computer science (CS) education helps students acquire skills such as computational thinking, problem-solving, and collaboration, among others. It has been linked with higher rates of college enrollment (
Brown & Brown, 2020;
Salehi et al., 2020), and a recent randomized control trial study also showed that lessons in computational thinking improved student response inhibition, planning, and coding skills (Arfé et., 2020). As these skills take preeminence in the rapidly changing 21st century, CS education promises to significantly enhance student preparedness for the future of work and active citizenship. CS education can also reduce skills inequality if education systems make a concerted effort to ensure that all students have equitable access to curricula that provide them with the needed breadth of skills, regardless of their gender, ethnicity, or socioeconomic status.
Based on prior analysis and expert consultation, we selected 11 country, state, and provincial CS-education case studies with lessons that can apply broadly to other education systems. These cases come from diverse global regions and circumstances and have implemented CS education programs for various periods and to different levels of success. As such, we have examined information to extract lessons that can lead to successful implementation. This study will focus on the development of CS education in Arkansas.
Research Corporation for Science Advancement, the Heising-Simons Foundation, NASA, and The Kavli Foundation are announcing awards totaling $1,100,000 to eight multidisciplinary teams of researchers in the inaugural year of Scialog: Signatures of Life in the Universe. Each of the 20 individual awards is for $55,000.
The initiative brought together 54 Scialog Fellows, early-career scientists from a variety of disciplines and institutions across the U.S. and Canada, including NASA. Fellows formed teams to propose cutting-edge research with the potential to transform our understanding of the habitability of planets, of how the occurrence of life alters planets and leaves signatures, and of how to detect such signatures beyond Earth, both within our solar system and on exoplanets.
UW-Madison secured a major donation to launch the construction of a new campus building that officials say will further cement the city as a growing tech hub.
The recently launched School of Computer, Data and Information Sciences will have a new home at the corner of Orchard Street and University Avenue, officials announced Friday. UW-Madison will demolish two service buildings currently located there to make way for the 300,000-square-foot, seven-story building. The estimated price tag is $225 million, all of which will be privately funded.
Billionaire Badgers John and Tashia Morgridge are donating $75 million for the building and pledge to give another $50 million in the form of a matching grant if UW-Madison raises $50 million on its own.
The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, the university’s patent-licensing arm, is kicking in the remaining $50 million. The donation is WARF’s largest for a single university building, according to spokesperson Jeanan Yasiri Moe.
U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, CDC Newsroom
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Today, the Biden-Harris Administration announced a $2.1 billion investment to improve infection prevention and control activities across the U.S. public health and healthcare sectors. The Biden-Harris Administration, working through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), is investing American Rescue Plan funding to strengthen and equip state, local, and territorial public health departments and other partner organizations with the resources needed to better fight infections in U.S. healthcare facilities, including COVID-19 and other known and emerging infectious diseases.
Princeton University, High Meadows Environmental Institute
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A team of Princeton University and University of Arizona researchers has received a $5 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for the HydroGEN (Hydrologic Scenario Generation) project, which will use machine learning and artificial intelligence to develop simulated models of the nation’s watershed systems.
HydroGEN is intended to put the latest hydrologic science directly into the hands of landscape managers, resource managers and policymakers so they can forecast future conditions, make informed decisions related to water security and conservation, and help people better prepare for flooding and drought. HydroGEN was one of only 10 projects nationwide to receive a total of $50 million for the second phase of the NSF’s Convergence Accelerator program, which supports interdisciplinary research that can provide solutions to challenges of national importance in the near future.
The Princeton end of the project is led by co-principal investigator Reed Maxwell, professor of civil and environmental engineering and the High Meadows Environmental Institute (HMEI), and will receive about $1.89 million, which will be managed by HMEI. The HydroGEN team is led by Laura Condon, assistant professor of hydrology and atmospheric sciences at the University of Arizona (UA). Co-leads on the project also include Peter Melchior, assistant professor of astrophysical sciences jointly appointed in Princeton’s Center for Statistics and Machine Learning, and Nirav Merchant, director of the UA Data Science Institute and co-head of CyVerse, a UA-led national computational infrastructure for the life-sciences funded by NSF.
Yale University, Yale Daily News student newspaper, Brian Zhang
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In Nepal, urban development has attracted people to cities due to the relative abundance of education, economic and social opportunities and healthcare services, Rusk said. As a result, 49 percent of the population is highly concentrated within a small number of urbanized areas. These places suffer particularly high casualty counts and the destruction of infrastructure when hazards, namely floods, landslides and fires, strike, according to student project researcher Emma Levin ’23.
In trying to carry out their research, the scientists found that the region’s highly mountainous topography not only made satellite observations challenging, but also contributes to the region’s vulnerability to certain hazards. According to Levin, people tend to live in areas where there are more risks, and that climate change is the driving force behind recent increases in the incidence and intensity of said hazards.
The project also emphasized understanding connections between how different hazards occur and interact with one another rather than focusing on individual risks.
Los Alamos Reporter, Los Alamos National Laboratory
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Principal investigator Kipton Barros of the Theoretical division will lead a multi-disciplinary team of researchers on a three-year, $2.4 million project in partnership with the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) to use data science—including artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML)—to advance the understanding of chemical and materials systems.
The team will use data science to explore three main areas in chemical and materials systems, including the self-assembly of soft materials (materials like plastic that respond easily to heat and other factors); the chemical processes of catalysis (a substance being used to advance a chemical reaction); and the role of stimuli (such as laser light) and external influences that help drive the outcome of chemical processes. The project will build models and simulations that can be applied in experiments. Ultimately, the resulting predictive AI/ML models, validated by experiments, will accelerate discovery of new chemistries and materials systems with exceptional properties and functionalities. The impact of the research may be seen in everything from better materials for solar cells to improved catalysts for chemistry to drug discovery.
Supported by a $30 million lead gift from the Falling Leaves Foundation, University of California Irvine will move forward with construction of a planned medical research facility on its campus, which is expected to enhance its cross-disciplinary teaching and translational research, the organization said Monday.
The approximately 200,000 square-foot Falling Leaves Foundation Medical Innovation Building will be one of the largest in the West, UCI said, and will provide space for core instruction and laboratories to extend advances in medicine and healthcare.
Cornell University, Bowers Computing and Information Science
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Mitigating abuses of encrypted social media communication, on outlets such as WhatsApp and Signal, while ensuring user privacy is a massive challenge on a range of fronts, including technological, legal and social.
A five-year, $3 million National Science Foundation grant to a multidisciplinary team of Cornell researchers aims to take early but significant steps on that arduous journey toward safe, secure online communication.
Thomas Ristenpart, associate professor of computer science at the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science and at Cornell Tech, is principal investigator (PI) of the project, “Privacy-Preserving Abuse Prevention for Encrypted Communications Platforms.”
“This is a charged topic area, because of the fears that these types of abuse mitigations will come at the cost of degrading privacy guarantees,” Ristenpart said. “So the real trick is trying to preserve privacy in a meaningful way, while still empowering and enabling users to be more protected from these kinds of abuse.”
Co-PI’s are Mor Naaman, professor of information science at Cornell Bowers CIS and at Cornell Tech; James Grimmelmann, the Tessler Family Professor of Digital and Information Law at Cornell Tech and at Cornell Law School; J. Nathan Matias, assistant professor of communication in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences; and Amy Zhang, assistant professor in the Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington.
A new multi-institution, transdisciplinary center will develop systems for two-way communication with plants, allowing scientists to remotely sense a plant’s biology and its immediate ecosystem, in hopes of one day using the information to improve plant growth.
The new Center for Research on Programmable Plant Systems (CROPPS), funded by a five-year, $25 million National Science Foundation (NSF) grant, aims to grow a new field called digital biology.
CROPPS will be led by researchers from the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, the College of Engineering and the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science. Partner institutions include the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (UIUC); the University of Arizona; and the Boyce Thompson Institute, at Cornell.
University of Rochester researcher Ranga Dias has been awarded a $1.6 million grant from the Gordan and Betty Moore Foundation to support his groundbreaking efforts to create viable superconducting materials.
The award will also help him prepare more researchers in the United States to join the quest.
“We want to take this to the broader scientific community,” says Dias, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering, whose research group has set new records by creating superconducting materials at or near room temperatures.