CRA Board member and Government Affairs Committee Chair Fred Schneider will testify along with Phillip Bond of Tech America and David Bodenheimer of Crowell and Moring, LLP at a hearing of the Terrorism, Unconventional Threats and Capabilities Subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee on Thursday, February 25 at 2:00 pm. The hearing will address private sector perspectives of the Department of Defense information technology and cybersecurity activities. The hearing will be web cast here.
On December 3, 2009, In Events, By MelissaNorr
DARPA will celebrate the 40th anniversary of ARPANET, the precursor to the Internet, with a network challenge this Saturday, December 5. The challenge seeks to test social networking with 10 weather balloons launched across the country. Teams will have to spot the balloons and collect the longitude and latitude of as many as possible. The first team to respond with all 10 wins the challenge and $40,000.
In the announcement of the challenge, DARPA Director Regina Dugan said, In the 40 years since this breakthrough, the Internet has become an integral part of society and the global economy. The DARPA Network Challenge explores the unprecedented ability of the Internet to bring people together to solve tough problems.
Peter Lee, director of the Transformational Convergence Technology Office at DARPA, said at MSNBC.com, “We’re learning more and more every day about social networks – how they form, how communities grow and how they change over time. It’s become a very interesting field of research … but when it’s a competition, the dynamic changes.”
With over 1000 registered teams competing in the challenge, the varying techniques on mobilization, dissemination, and collaboration are already informative though Lee told MSNBC.com that the most original ideas have probably not been revealed yet to maintain the competitive edge. Lee also expects subterfuge, deception, and information selling to show up in the competition.
Registration is still open to participate in the challenge and you can sign up here. Itll be very interesting to see all the techniques used and to see how long it takes for a team to find all 10 balloons. Well link to the announcement of the winner when it is announced.
ScienceWorksForUS, a joint effort by the Association of American Universities (AAU), the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU), and The Science Coalition (TSC), launched today on Capitol Hill with Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) in attendance. The interesting and much needed initiative is designed to illustrate how the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) funding is supporting research across the country and how that research impacts the nation economically, both in the short and long term. The website of the initiative gives researchers a chance to tell their stories and to share their research with a wider public audience.
As we’ve mentioned here before, the ARRA included over $21 billion in science funding, including money to build research facilities, buy equipment, and conduct research. The immediate impact is to continue or increase employment of researchers, equipment manufacturers, and facility construction workers. However, the long-term impact will be more, higher paying jobs in industries that are created from the research or that help solve challenges in energy, healthcare, and other high priority challenges that the US faces in the coming decades.
From the CCC Blog
- MIT’s Subra Suresh reportedly to be nominated as new Director of NSF Ran Libeskind-Hadas
- Eric Brewer wins ACM – Infosys Foundation Award Ed Lazowska
- Chuck Thacker wins Turing Award Ed Lazowska
- FOCUS identifies “The Best Jobs in America� Ed Lazowska