Simons Institute for ToC: Opportunities and Deadlines

The Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing would like to announce the following opportunities and deadlines:

- First annual round of Research Fellow positions (deadline Jan 15, 2013).
- Biannual call for program proposals (deadline Dec 15, 2012).
- New (temporary) website, which in addition to the above also gives details of upcoming programs and other activities in 2013-14.

The topics of the research programs for Fall 2013 are “Real Analysis in Computer Science” and “Theoretical Foundations of Big Data Analysis,” and the topics for Spring 2014 are “Algorithms and Models in Evolutionary Biology” and “Quantum Hamiltonian Complexity.”

FOCS 2012 workshops

On Saturday, October 20th, from 9am till 6pm, there will be three workshops as part of the FOCS 2012 conference:

• Bayesian Mechanism Design. (Organizers: Constantinos Daskalakis and Jason Hartline)
• Randomized Numerical Linear Algebra: Theory and Practice.  (Organizers: Christos Boutsidis, Petros Drineas, and Haim Avron)
• Data Structures (in memory of Mihai Patrascu) (Organizers: Alexandr Andoni, Erik Demaine, Piotr Indyk, and Mikkel Thorup)

See this page for more details.

 

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!

Call for ACM Award Nominations

[Note: The task of nominating someone for a high-profile award can be daunting, but the CATCS is available to help. If there is a nomination you want to make but the process seems overwhelming, contact us and we may be able to provide advice, connect you with people who can help, etc.]

KEY PEOPLE NOMINATIONS SOLICITED

As part of its mission, ACM brings broad recognition to outstanding technical and professional achievements within the computing and information technology community. Each year our award committees evaluate the contributions of candidates for various awards that span a spectrum of professional and technological accomplishments.

Nominations by ACM members of those who deserve recognition for their contributions to the field of computing are welcomed.

The deadline for the majority of awards is November 30, 2012.

Here are the exceptions to the November 30th deadline.

ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award – October 31, 2012: http://awards.acm.org/html/dda.cfm
ACM Senior Member – September 4, 2012: http://awards.acm.org/html/senior_member_nom_guide.cfm
ACM – IEEE CS Eckert-Mauchly Award – March 30, 2013: http://awards.acm.org/eckert%5Fmauchly/
ACM – IEEE CS Ken Kennedy Award – July 1, 2013: http://awards.acm.org/homepage.cfm?awd=167
ACM Distinguished Member – August 1, 2013: http://www.acm.org/awards/distinguished_member_nom_guide.html
ACM Fellows – September 5, 2012: http://awards.acm.org/html/fellow_nom_guide.cfm
ACM Gordon Bell Prize – April 30, 2013: http://awards.acm.org/homepage.cfm?srt=all&awd=160

The deadline for the following ACM awards is November 30, 2012:

A.M. Turing Award: http://awards.acm.org/homepage.cfm?awd=140
ACM – Infosys Foundation Award: http://awards.acm.org/homepage.cfm?awd=165
Distinguished Service Award: http://awards.acm.org/distinguished%5Fservice/
Grace Murray Hopper Award: http://awards.acm.org/hopper/
Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award: http://awards.acm.org/kanellakis/
Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award: http://awards.acm.org/karlstrom/
Eugene L. Lawler Award for Humanitarian Contributions
within Computer Science and Informatics (Biennial): http://awards.acm.org/lawler/
Outstanding Contribution to ACM Award: http://awards.acm.org/outstanding%5Fcontribution/
ACM – AAAI Allen Newell Award: http://awards.acm.org/newell/
SIAM-ACM Prize in Computational Science http://www.siam.org/prizes/sponsored/cse.php
and Engineering – 2013 (date to be announced) http://awards.acm.org/homepage.cfm?srt=all&awd=151
Software System Award: http://awards.acm.org/software%5Fsystem/

For information on SIG Awards please see: http://www.acm.org/sigs/sig-awards

Please refer to the ACM Awards page, http://www.acm.org/awards/, for:
• award descriptions, and lists containing the names of the previous ACM Award winners and their citations,
• nomination procedures for the 2012 awards, including the membership of the 2012 Award Committees, and contact information for the chairs: http://awards.acm.org/html/award_nominations.cfm

Thank you.

C.C. (Kelly) Gotlieb (kelly27@sympatico.ca ) and Cherri Pancake (pancake@nacse.org)
ACM Awards Committee Co-chairs

Erik Altman (ealtman@us.ibm.com)
SGB Awards Committee Liaison

Rosemary McGuinness (mcguinness@acm.org)
ACM Awards Committee Liaison

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!

NSF Workshop on Research Directions in the Principles of Parallel Computation

There will be a one day NSF sponsored workshop on Research Directions in the Principles of Parallel Computation immediately following SPAA on June 28th in Pittsburgh.   The purpose is to brainstorm about possible research directions in the theory of parallel computation.  The workshop offers travel grants for students and the registration is free to all.   Also, the early registration deadline for SPAA is May 25th.

 

FOCS 2012 workshops

STOC 2012 started a new experiment of a workshop and tutorial day in the beginning of the conference. The program looks fascinating and I hope many people attend.

FOCS 2012 will have also have such an event on Saturday, October 20. We (Boaz Barak and Avrim Blum) are looking for proposals for workshops to run on that day. So, if you want to organize a workshop that day, please do visit the link above and send us a proposal by June 20, 2012.

Hope everyone enjoys the STOC workshops and please do start thinking of ideas for great FOCS workshops!