Simons-Berkeley Research Fellowships

The Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing at UC Berkeley is currently accepting applications for research fellowships for the 2013-14 academic year, during which time the institute will have programs on  ”Real Analysis in Computer Science,” “Theoretical Foundations of Big Data Analysis,”  ”Evolutionary Biology and the Theory of Computing,” and “Quantum Hamiltonian Complexity.”

These positions are for postdocs and junior researchers, including those who will have a position elsewhere and want to spend a semester at the institute to participate in one of the programs.  Note that the deadline is very soon – January 15.    

[On the topic of postdocs, the CATCS encourages researchers in the community to explore the possibility of hiring postdocs using grants or other sources of funding this year.  With the ending of the CI Fellows program and the previous Simons Foundation postdoctoral program, hosts who can provide funding may have a greater opportunity to recruit excellent candidates.]

NSF Exploiting Parallelism and Scalability (XPS) program

The deadline for the NSF Exploiting Parallelism and Scalability (XPS) program is February 20, 2013.  This program offers grants of up to $750,000 to “support groundbreaking research leading to a new era of parallel computing.”  One of the focus areas is “Foundational Principles,” in which research “should engender a paradigm shift in the ways in which one conceives, develops, analyzes, and uses parallel algorithms, languages, and concurrency.”

Each proposal is required to have “two or more PIs providing different and distinct expertise relevant to the program’s focus areas”, and in particular the program welcomes collaborations between theorists and researchers in other areas of computer science.

Simons Awards for Graduate Students in TCS

The Simons Foundation Division for Mathematics and the Physical Sciences invites applications for the  Simons Award for Graduate Students in Theoretical Computer Science program. These awards will be made to graduate students with an outstanding track record of research accomplishments.  To be eligible the applicant must be a graduate student who has completed two, three or four years at a U.S. or Canadian institution of higher education. A track record of outstanding results in theoretical computer science is the key criterion.  Deadline: February 7, 2013.

Another upcoming Simons deadline (January 31, 2013) is for the Collaboration Grants for Mathematicians program, which will make a large number of grants to accomplished, active researchers who do not otherwise have access to substantial research funding that supports travel and visitors.

 

Simons Investigator Nominations

This year, the Simons Foundation started the Simons Investigator program, which provides a stable base of support for a selected group of outstanding scientists in theoretical computer science, mathematics, and theoretical physics, enabling them to undertake long-term study of fundamental questions.

For the 2013 Simons Investigators, the Simons Foundation has asked 90 university presidents to provide a nomination up to two nominations in each of the three areas by December 14.  Given the short timeline, it may be good to check that your department chair and administration are aware of and pursuing this opportunity.

NSF Graduate Research Fellowship: deadline Nov 13

Message below from CISE directors:

From: CISE Announcements [mailto:CISE-ANNOUNCE@LISTSERV.NSF.GOV] On Behalf Of Jahanian, Farnam

Sent: Monday, September 24, 2012 3:12 PM
To: CISE-ANNOUNCE@LISTSERV.NSF.GOV
Subject: Graduate Research Fellowship Program

Dear Colleagues,

The 2013 National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowships Program (GRFP) solicitation has been posted at http://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=6201&org=CISE&from=home.  The application deadline for CISE and Engineering is November 13, 2012.

GRFP supports outstanding students to purse research-based master’s and doctoral degrees. Applicants must be US citizens or nationals, or permanent resident aliens of the United States by the application deadline. In addition to the solicitation page, http://www.nsfgrfp.org/ contains useful information about the program and available resources.

It is important for the CISE community to expand and mentor our pipeline of future researchers and educators. We are asking you to promote the GRFP opportunity to your students and colleagues and to those in advising positions in your department and at your institution.

Sincerely,

Farnam Jahanian, Assistant Director, Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE)

Susanne Hambrusch, Division Director, Computing and Communication Foundations Division (CCF)

Keith Marzullo, Division Director, Computer and Network Systems (CNS)

Howard Wactlar, Division Director, Information & Intelligent Systems (IIS)

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NSF CCF Medium-Size Proposal Deadline *October 9*

This is a reminder of the upcoming October 9 “Medium-Size” deadline for NSF proposals in the Computing and Communication Foundations (CCF) Core Programs.

Medium-size projects have a total budget of 500,001 to 1,200,000 USD and durations of up to four years.  They are typically awarded to small groups of 2-3 researchers, who need not be from the same institution.  So they can be a great way to initiate or support an existing collaboration.  Single-PI proposals requesting support for multiple students and/or postdocs are allowed as well.  Note that “a Collaboration Plan is required for all Medium proposals with more than one investigator” (which could include workshops, students from one institution spending time at the other, etc.)

An additional note (this appears to be a new policy): “In any contiguous September through December period, an individual may participate as PI, Co-PI or Senior Personnel in no more than two Small, Medium, or Large proposals submitted in response to the coordinated solicitation (where coordinated solicitation is defined to include the Information and Intelligent Systems (IIS): Core Programs, the Computer and Network Systems (CNS): Core Programs and the Computing and Communication Foundations (CCF): Core Programs solicitations). For example, between September 2012 and December 2012, an individual may participate as PI, co-PI or Senior Personnel in one proposal submitted to a core program in CCF and in a second proposal submitted to a core program in CNS, or an individual may participate as PI, co-PI or Senior Personnel in two proposals submitted to an IIS core program, etc.”

Good luck with your proposals!

NSF upcoming deadlines & quantum workshop

Sept 28-29: Workshop on Quantum Information Science at the University of Maryland.  Relates to the new NSF Interdisciplinary Faculty Program in Quantum Information Science.  See also CCC blog post about the workshop.

Oct. 9:  Computing and Communications Foundations (CCF) Core Programs deadline for medium-sized proposals. This includes the Algorithmic Foundations program, which funds a broad range of research in theoretical computer science.   Large proposals are due Nov. 30 and small proposals are due Dec. 17.

Nov. 13: Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GFRP) deadline in Computer Science. (Mathematical Sciences deadline is Nov. 14.)  Open to students who are U.S. citizens, nationals, or permanent residents, and have completed at most one year of full-time graduate study.

Nov. 30: Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace (SaTC) deadline for medium-sized proposals.  The research supported by this program includes cryptography and privacy.  Small proposals and education proposals are due Dec. 14, and Frontier proposals (> Large) are due Jan. 30.

Dec. 4: CISE-MPS Interdisciplinary Faculty Program in Quantum Information Science.  Provides supplemental sabbatical salary for tenured faculty to make semester or year-long visits to other institutions to work on quantum information science.

Dec. 10: Expeditions in Computing deadline.  Supports ambitious large-scale projects at up to $2m/year for 5 years.  The Center for Computational Intractability (CCI) at Princeton is supported by this program.

Simons Institute Call for Proposals

The Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing has a Call for Proposals for semester-long programs in the year 2014 (Spring or Fall).  Deadline July 15, 2012.

From the CFP:

• A typical program is organized by a group of 4-6 Organizers, who will oversee the scientific content and issue invitations to others to participate. Most of the Organizers are expected to be in residence for a substantial portion of the program.
• The following figures give a rough idea of the scale of a typical semester-long program. The core participants consist of about 30-35 long-term (one month or more, ideally full semester) visitors, including the Organizers. These would typically include about 15-20 faculty, 6-10 postdocs, and 5-15 visiting and local graduate students. The program would typically include two or three week-long workshops during the semester, each of which attracts an additional 30-35 people. There will also be an introductory intensive course at the start of the program, and a week-long reunion workshop one year after the end of the program. The Organizers receive a budget that is intended to provide partial salary and expenses support for visitors, based on need.
• The Institute is committed to identifying programs that can potentially lead to substantial advances in the field, rather than “business as usual.” In keeping with this objective, we particularly encourage programs that bring together two or more distinct groups of researchers with related interests (some of which may lie outside theoretical CS) who do not generally collaborate on a regular basis; programs that seek to define an agenda for a relatively new subfield; or programs that propose a novel and timely attack on major open problems.

For more information about what a proposal should look like and how to submit, see the Simons Institute Call for Proposals.

 

NSF Solicitation on Big Data

NSF has a new solicitation out on Core Techniques and Technologies for Advancing Big Data Science & Engineering (BIGDATA).  Deadline is June 13 for mid-scale projects ($250k-$1m per year) and July 11 for small-scale projects (up to $250k per year).  Note that these “smalls” are substantially larger than Core Program smalls since the above is per year.  Bala Kalyanasundaram is the point-person for our (Algorithmic Foundations) community.  If there are enough proposals from AF, they might be able to have an AF panel.

According to the solicitation, this program

“aims to advance the core scientific and technological means of managing,  analyzing, visualizing, and extracting useful information from large, diverse, distributed and heterogeneous data sets so as to: accelerate the progress of scientific discovery and innovation; lead to new fields of inquiry that would not otherwise be possible; encourage the development of new data analytic tools and algorithms; facilitate scalable, accessible, and sustainable data infrastructure; increase understanding of human and social processes and interactions; and promote economic growth and improved health and quality of life.”

Proposals should focus on one or more of the following perspectives:

1. Data collection and management (DCM)
2. Data analytics (DA).
3. E-science collaboration environments (ESCE).

The description of the data analytics thrust in particular lists a number of algorithmic, data structure, mathematical modeling, and statistical directions.  See the solicitation for more information.

Remember, June 13 for mid-scale and July 11 for small-scale.  Good luck everyone!

DARPA Call for Proposals on “big data” (XDATA)

DARPA-BAA-12-38: XDATA is a call for proposals by DARPA on “big data”. Abstracts (not required, 4 pages) due April 20.  Proposals due May 30.

From the announcement:

The XDATA program seeks to develop computational techniques and software tools for analyzing large volumes of data, both semi-structured (e.g., tabular, relational, categorical, meta-data) and unstructured (e.g., text documents, message traffic). Central challenges to be addressed include a) developing scalable algorithms for processing imperfect data in distributed data stores, and b) creating effective human-computer interaction tools for facilitating rapidly customizable visual reasoning for diverse missions.

…

Proposals are encouraged from diverse areas of expertise including computer scientists, electrical engineers, statisticians, computational biologists, applied mathematicians, econometricians, economists, and others, groups with experience processing large amounts of data and/or visualizing information.

As always, when you think DARPA, think demo, though this BAA seems fairly algorithms-friendly.  Since it is probably too late to put together an abstract if you are just hearing about this for the first time, standard advice is to contact the program manager if you are interested in submitting.  Also if anyone would like to guest-blog about experiences/advice regarding DARPA from a TCS perspective, please feel free to contact any of us on the CATCS.