Zzzoot

The final report for the NSF Information Seeking Support Systems Workshop has been released . "The general goal of the workshop will be to coalesce a research agenda that stimulates progress toward better systems that support information seeking." From the executive summary: Our nation and our world depend on citizens who are able to seek, assess, understand, and use diverse kinds of information. Much of the information we need is complex with different components held in disparate electronic sources and many of our efforts to gather, assess, and use this information are done in collaboration with others. Additionally, much of the information we need is not discretely anticipated, but rather emerges as seeking and reflection continues over time. Information seeking in the digital age is a kind of problem solving activity that demands agile and symbiotic coordination of human and cyber resources; in short, a fundamental kind of computationally-augmented thinking. Computation ...

This workshop - to be held at Indiana University March 26,27 2009 - examines the question: " given millions of dollars invested in initiating software development, how is software that will be important to the US research and engineering communities identified, maintained, and supported over years to decades? " Of course a question of interest for other countries and their cyberinfrastructure initiatives. Workshop Goals: The goals of the Cyberinfrastructure Software Sustainability and Reusability workshop are as follows: Examine software evaluation and adoption models by individual research labs and virtual organizations Examine models for long-term software sustainability – the ability to obtain the software one wants with assurance, obtain the information required to use the software, obtain the software and hardware environments required to run the software, and use the software. Discuss mechanisms for supporting sustainability, including direct government support, unive...

The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) has announced the four 2007 grant ($10M over 5 years) awardees of its Expeditions in Computing . The funded projects are: Understand, Cope with, and Benefit From Intractability Computational Sustainability: Computational Methods for a Sustainable Environment, Economy, and Society Open Programmable Mobile Internet 2020 Molecular Programming Project