The Case for Basic Research

The transcript of Eric Lander’s talk “The Miracle Machine,” given at the National Math Festival, makes a powerful case for basic research.

DARPA DSO Proposer’s Event

As posted on the CCC blog, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Defense Sciences Office (DSO) is sponsoring a Proposers Event on July 21-22 to provide information to potential proposers on the objectives of the anticipated Defense Sciences Office (DSO) Office-wide Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) releasing sometime in June 2015. Note that the event will be webcast, and advance registration is required for both the in-person meeting (by June 30) and the webcast (by July 14).

Of the technical areas supported by the DSO, theoretical computer science work seems a closest match for “Mathematics, Modeling, and Design”: Development and implementation of advanced mathematics and modeling tools for applications of interest to U.S. national security. Example topics: novel mathematical advances that accelerate discovery in physics, chemistry, and materials science; new approaches to electromagnetic modeling and simulation; major conceptual advances that lead to novel computation at scale; advanced mathematics and modeling tools needed to efficiently propagate multiple sources of uncertainty to make accurate predictions about stochastic, complex systems; representational and computational foundations for new design approaches and tools; and techniques to enhance the capability for humans to understand, construct and optimize complex engineering systems.

Highlights from STOC presentation

Since there wasn’t time to go through the full CATCS Report during the STOC business meeting last week, here are a few items of note.

• The URL http://www.theorymatters.org/ (listed in the presentation) is no longer active.  For now, our blog is just https://thmatters.wordpress.com/
• Tim Roughgarden will be taking over as chair of CATCS starting in August.
• Do make use of the cstheory-jobs site to advertise or look for jobs in theoretical computer science.

And many upcoming deadlines:

• June 30, 2015: proposals for 2017 programs at the Simons Institute 
• July 21, 2015: NSF CAREER Award (for new/young faculty).  See also our repository of past CAREER proposals and other proposal-writing tips.
• Late summer: universities sent calls for nominations for Simons Investigator Awards (long-term support for individuals)
• Late summer: Simons Fellows in Math (sabbatical funding)
• Early fall: Simons Collaborations in Math & Physical Sciences. (large grants for collaborative efforts on fundamental scientific questions of major importance)
• September 10, 2015: Nominations for ACM Fellows.
• September 16, 2015: NSF Medium proposals to Algorithmic Foundations, Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace, and other programs.
• TBD (September?): Guggenheim Fellowships
• September 24, 2015: NSF Large proposals to Algorithmic Foundations, Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace, and other programs.
• September 30, 2015: NSF CISE Research Initiation Initiative (CRII).   For new faculty, easier to get than a CAREER award (but both can be submitted at once).  See FAQ.
• October 19, 2015: NSF Mathematical Sciences Postdoctoral Research Fellowship
• TBD (late Oct): NSF Graduate Research Fellowships
• October 31, 2015: ACM Dissertation Award
• November 1, 2015: AAAS Science & Technology Policy Fellowships
• November 18, 2015: NSF Small proposals to Algorithmic Foundations, Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace, and other programs.
• November 30, 2015: Many ACM Awards (e.g. Turing, Hopper, Kanellakis, Distinguished Service)
• Rolling or Dec 1: CCC Visioning Workshops (eg Theoretical Foundations of Social Computing 6/29-6/30)
• December 7, 2015: NSF CISE-MPS Interdisciplinary Faculty Program in Quantum Information (sabbatical support)
• December 7, 2015: NSF Exploiting Parallelism & Scalability (XPS)
• February 8, 2015: NSF Algorithms in the Field (AitF)
• TBD: Simons Award for Graduate Students in TCS
• March 1, 2016: Nominations for IEEE Fellows.
• March 9, 2016: NSF CISE Expeditions in Computing Preliminary Proposals
• TBD (April?): Symposia at 2017 AAAS Annual Meeting
• TBD (May?): NSF BIGDATA program
• Any time: DIMACS special focus proposal

STOC 2015 Presentation

Since time is tight at the STOC 2015 business meeting, I am attaching the slides for the CATCS presentation that would have been given: CATCS Report STOC 2015