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Revision as of 10:18, 19 June 2008

• ADVICE FROM THE TOP: UNIVERSITY RESEARCH HELPS USA COMPETE

By Del Jones, USA Today, May 19, 2008

The Bayh-Dole Act was enacted 27 years ago, but the ramifications persist to this day. The act lets universities patent and commercialize inventions that come from federally funded research. It has gradually turned universities into incubators for breakthroughs in technology and medicine. Stanford owns the patent on Google's Internet search technology, and last year, the university earned $48 million from 428 technologies licensed to companies. Texas Instruments was early to recognize the power of university research. The company has partnerships with Rice, Georgia Tech and the University of Illinois, among others, and with universities in India and China. CEO Rich Templeton, 49, spoke with USA TODAY management reporter Del Jones about the R&D coming from colleges. Complete article at: [1]

Adamic and Ackerman Research in ACM TechNews

Research by SI Faculty Lada Adamic and Mark Ackerman on Yahoo! Answers is highlighted in the April 28, 2008 addition of ACM TechNews. For a link to the copy of the entire article go to the TechNews section of the ACM website.

Call for Papers: Social Science Computer Review on e-Social Science:

Since the beginning of the new millennium, a world-wide effort has been underway to develop and deploy a new generation of advanced infrastructure which, it is argued, is essential to enable new advances in scientific research. This infrastructure, known as ‘the Grid’ or increasingly commonly as ‘e-Infrastructure’ (cyberinfrastructure in the US), comprises networked, interoperable, scalable computational tools and services that make it possible to locate, access, share, aggregate and manipulate digitised data seamlessly on a hitherto unrealisable scale.

The motivation for this special issue of the Social Science Computer Review is to document the state-of-the-art in e-Social Science. This embraces two distinct strands of work: one examines the impact of e-infrastructure on the social science research community’s capacity to meet its research challenges and the other traces the contribution that e-Social Science is making to solving the very real and significant obstacles to the wide adoption of e-infrastructure across all the sciences.

Our aim in this special issue is to improve mutual awareness, harmonize understanding, and instigate coordinated activities to accelerate research, development, and deployment of e-infrastructure to support the social science research community.

To this end, we invite contributions from members of the social science and e-infrastructure research communities with experience of – or interests in – exploring, developing, and applying new methods, practices, and tools that are facilitated by e-infrastructure in order to further social science research, and in studying the wider development of e-infrastructure-enabled research and its component technologies.

Topics of interest include, but are not restricted to, the following:

• Case studies of e-Social Science research methods and applications

• Accessing new sources and forms of social data through e-Social Science

• Infrastructure and tools for e-Social Science

• Middleware for data collection, sharing and integration

• Standards for metadata, ontologies, annotation, curation, etc.

• Usability issues in the design of research tools and middleware

• Case studies of (e-)Research and (e-)Social Science research practices

• The benefits and challenges of large scale collaborative research

• Issues about the wider adoption and sustainability of e-Infrastructure

• Evolution of the e-Infrastructure roadmap, from Grids to web 2.0

• Interdisciplinary research in e-Social Science

• International collaborations in e-Social Science

• Socio-technical issues in the development of e-Research and e-infrastructure

• Ethical issues and challenges in the collection, integration, sharing and analysis of social and personal data

Submission requirements and instructions

Submissions should be between 6000-8000 words in length.

All submissions will be subject to independent review by the members of the special issue editorial panel and a final decision will be made by the special issue editors.

Deadlines and submission instructions

Drafts of full papers are due on July 1st, 2008. They should be emailed to Rob Procter (rob.procter@manchester.ac.uk) to whom any queries should also be sent.

Increase in Graduate Research Fellowship Program in FY09: According to a report in the 3/14 issue of Science

[2], NSF has requested a significant increase in funding for the Graduate Research Fellowship program in the FY 09 budget. This would be a rise from $88 M to $110 M, or approximately 700 new awards (which should raise the current 10% success rate for applicants). This increase is attributed to Richard Freeman’s data showing that the GRFs play a disproportionate role in encouraging undergraduates to pursue scientific careers. Specifically, in one survey of 1800 Harvard undergrads, 40% said they would opt for graduate school if given a “national fellowship,” in contrast to the 18% who would otherwise pursue graduate education. Freeman has also studied the signaling role of GRFs, where the awards per number of undergrad science and engineering degrees has dropped from a high of 5.4 awards per 1000 degrees at the program’s inception in the early 50s – to 2.2 awards per 1000 degrees recently. That is, as the availability of awards has gone down, students have made other choices (Freeman also points out that the value of the awards declined to around $15 K in the 1990s, but has recently been boosted to a more competitive level of $30 K). Here’s a link to Freeman’s most comprehensive analysis: [3] Of course, Congress has to improve this increase. However, it is the single biggest increase in NSF’s education budget – and the leadership on the House oversight committee for NSF hasn’t rejected the increase.

For information regarding this years winners go to [Awardee List]

For program information please go to [the NSF Graduate Fellows website]