The Blue Waters Graduate Fellowship Program enables select graduate students from across the country to immerse themselves in a year of focused high-performance computing (HPC) research. The fellowships will empower these talented graduate students to advance their HPC knowledge while also providing them with time and support to accelerate their research. The fellowships provide PhD students with a year of support, including a $38,000 stipend, up to $12,000 in tuition allowance, an allocation on the powerful Blue Waters petascale computing system at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), and funds to support travel to a Blue Waters-sponsored symposium. Apply today!

Play-i is a startup that is making delightful robots that make computer programming fun and accessible for children ages 5 and up. They are launching a pair of robots - Bo and Yana - today in a crowdfunding campaign. These robots are perfect for children ages 5-10, so elementary school teachers are especially encouraged to sign up. If your school gets selected, they will be given to you for free during the summer of 2014. As part of their crowdfunding campaign, they are raising money to buy robots for schools and organizations in need. To get more information about donating or bringing robotics into your classroom please visit the website.

Some U.S. states are starting to boost computer science education as a way to prepare students for high-paying jobs that will help boost the economy. In May, Washington State Gov. Jay Inslee signed a bill to count Advance Placement (AP) computer science as a math or science credit. The state previously offered computer science as an elective, and many students passed over the course for others that met graduation requirements. Nationwide, just 10 percent of schools offer programming classes, and only 10 states count computer science toward math or science requirements for high school graduation. Experts say the sooner students develop a love for computer science, the better, and in- and after-school activities will be key to helping cultivate and sustain their interest in the subject.

Indiana University professor and artificial intelligence expert Douglas Hofstadter directs the Fluid Analogies Research Group (FARG) in a mission to understand how humans think and to write software that functions in the same manner. FARG believes the mind is akin to a unique piece of software and to understand how software works, you must write it yourself. If successful, the group will not only explain human thought, but also make truly intelligent machines. Although in the early 1980s Hofstadter was hailed as a leader in the emerging AI field, his popularity waned as AI proved more difficult than first envisioned and mainstream AI has embraced more attainable goals.

They are almost passed 1.8 million students planning to participate in the Hour of Code across 144 countries! It’s now on track to be the largest online education event in history, proving that the demand for computer science education knows no boundaries. See every school participating at http://csedweek.org/events/events. Registered schools have a chance to win laptops or a video chat with Bill Gates, and the odds of winning are still exceptionally high in many states. With CSEdWeek (Dec. 9-15) only a few weeks away, please help your students join in on this record-breaking event.

Hour of Code tutorials are ready to try -- with options for every age and every device. Although there may be a few bugs, they invite you to check out the options. In particular, Code.org’s own tutorials are available to preview for the first time - learn basic sequencing, repeat loops, and if-then statements from Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, and Angry Birds. To view the tutorials, please visit the http://csedweek.org. Don't forget Computer Science Education week is December 9-15, 2013!

IBM recently unveiled its Accelerated Discovery Lab (ADLab), which aims to augment the data-mining concept in practical application domains with smart analytics derived from its Watson question-and-answer technology combined with deep domain knowledge for each area being researched. "Instead of looking for answers that are already known--where it's just a matter of finding them--we are learning how to search for things that are not yet known," says IBM's Jeff Welser.

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have demonstrated a device dubbed the "Kinect of the future" that can see through walls and pinpoint the movements of someone with an accuracy of plus or minus 10 centimeters. "What we're doing here is localization through a wall without requiring you to hold any transmitter or receiver [and] simply by using reflections off a human body," says Fadel Adib, a Ph.D. student on the project from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. "What is impressive is that our accuracy is higher than even state-of-the-art Wi-Fi localization."

Ada Lovelace wrote the first computer program in 1842, a feat that is commemorated on Oct. 15. However, 171 years later most programmers are men, and just 18 percent of computer science degrees are awarded to women, according to Symantec and the Anita Borg Institute, which works to recruit and promote women in tech. As Lovelace's history indicates, women have played a significant role in the software industry, and some say the tide is changing again in Silicon Valley.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded a $5 million grant for a collaborative five-year project under which researchers at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California, San Diego will help develop and build a Science Gateway Platform (SciGaP) as a service to advance scientific discovery by providing researchers improved access to a variety of hosted or cloud services. The project will be led by Indiana University’s (IU) Marlon Pierce and Suresh Marru, with IU’s Science Gateways Group. Science Gateway group leaders Mark Miller and Amit Majumdar will lead SDSC’s participation in the project, joined by Borries Demeler from The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio (UTHSCSA).

Computer science provides a foundation for virtually any career - everybody can benefit from learning the basics. Computer Science Education Week is observed each year, in recognition of the birthday of computing pioneer Admiral Grace Murray Hopper (December 9, 1906). The Hour of Code is just one of many different events planned for CSEdWeek. It's a one-hour introduction to computer science, designed to demystify "code" and show that anyone can learn the basics to be a maker, a creator, an innovator.

XSEDE is releasing a set of software that enables researchers and campus-based IT managers to build a “basic XSEDE-compatible computing cluster” from scratch, conveniently. This capability is provided by a bundle of software called a “ROCKS Roll.” ROCKS (http://www.rocksclusters.org/) is a tool that automates the process of building a cluster from a pre-defined set of software. A video about the XSEDE Campus Bridging cluster software project is online at http://youtu.be/E96mlWruATM. For further inquiries, call 812-318-2872 9 am to 5 pm eastern time, or send email to campusbridging@xsede.org

University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) researchers have IQ-tested the ConceptNet4, considered one of the best available artificial intelligence systems, and found that it is about as smart as the average four-year-old. The researchers tested the ConceptNet4 system using a standard IQ assessment for young children. Sloan says one of the hardest problems in building an artificial intelligence is devising a computer program that can make sound and prudent judgments based on a simple perception of the situation or facts, which he notes is the dictionary definition of common sense.

Christopher Johnson, founding director of the University of Utah's Scientific Computing and Imaging (SCI) Institute, has been named the recipient of the 2013 IEEE Computer Society Sidney Fernbach Award for his work in scientific visualization and computing. Johnson is a Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at the University of Utah, and also holds faculty appointments in the departments of physics and bioengineering. In 1992, he founded the SCI research group, which has since evolved into the 200-person SCI Institute.

The FIDO Alliance is aggressively pushing a new standard of biometric identification for consumer access to mobile payments and other services. FIDO Alliance president Michael Barrett anticipates the rollout of Android models with FIDO-compliant biometric fingerprint sensors in six months. FIDO is designed to reduce, if not completely eliminate, the use of passwords to access accounts on mobile devices. Although the Touch ID fingerprint sensor included in Apple's latest iPhone is not FIDO-compliant, Barrett says it is a simple matter to adapt the technology to his group's standard.

Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab director Andrew Ng has released a paper aimed at making deep learning more accessible to researchers by showing how to make a neural network that costs about $20,000 using powerful but inexpensive graphics-processing units (GPUs). Deep learning relies on a combination of hardware and software to imitate the functioning of the human brain. Last year at Google, Ng built a $1-million computerized brain that detects cat videos on Youtube. However, Ng says some researchers wondered how they could make progress in deep learning without that level of funding.

University of Washington researchers have developed a programming language for chemistry that they hope will streamline efforts to design a network that can guide the behavior of chemical-reaction mixtures in the same way that embedded electronic controllers guide devices. The language is used to write programs that direct the movement of tailor-made molecules. "The vision is that eventually, you can use this technology to build general-purpose tools," says Washington professor Georg Seelig. He notes the approach is similar to programming languages that tell a computer what to do. "I think this is appealing because it allows you to solve more than one problem," Seelig says.

Over at the Cray Blog, Jay Gould writes that Indiana University’s new Big Red II supercomputer is 25 times faster than its predecessor. Utilizing the world’s fastest university-owned supercomputer, IU will now be able to address new science and technology challenges, addressing much larger and vastly more complex problems. Building on the success of the original Big Red 1 system, the Big Red II supercomputer was dedicated and opened for discovery in April of this year. The University is using Big Red II to arm its smartest computational science minds with the tools they need to lead us into the next wave of technical exploration.

HPC luminary Jack Dongarra has been selected to receive an ACM-IEEE Computer Society Ken Kennedy Award for "his leadership in designing and promoting standards for mathematical software used to solve numerical problems common to high performance computing (HPC)." Dongarra is a Distinguished University Professor at the University of Tennessee, where he is the founder and director of the Innovative Computing Laboratory. He also holds positions at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the University of Manchester.

With Google Translate's new handwriting tool, users can draw an unfamiliar word or character on their Android smartphone or tablet and immediately get a translation. The application is especially useful when encountering words that use alphabets not based on the Latin alphabet, such as Chinese, Russian, or Arabic. Google initially acquired the first phase of the handwriting tool for Android in January 2012 and has been developing the technology for the past year. In February, it updated the input features by adding new virtual keyboards and transliteration tools. The handwriting tool now supports 45 languages, including Arabic, Chinese, Greek, Lao, and Yiddish.

Self-driving cars will come with a wide range of sensors, creating machine-to-machine data at the rate of 1GB per second, according to BigData-Startups.com founder Mark van Rijmenam. He also notes the sensors will provide greater opportunities to spot mechanical problems before they happen. "With the amount of cars worldwide to surpass one billion, it is almost unimaginable how much data will be created when Google's self-driving car will become common on the streets," Rijmenam says. By 2020, there will be several autonomous vehicle offerings that consumers can buy at a reasonable price point, according to Gartner analyst Thilo Koslowski. If the 1GB per second prediction is accurate, self-driving cars would, on average, create about two petabytes of data per year.

Researchers at the LSU Center for Computation & Technology, or CCT, have received a $4 million Major Research Instrumentation, or MRI, award from the National Science Foundation, or NSF, for the acquisition of SuperMIC, a new supercomputer cluster. This is the largest NSF MRI award LSU has ever received. The instrumentation, which will be harnessed for a variety of research projects involving discovery of new drugs, modeling coastal processes and forecasting hurricane-generated waves and storm surges, will bring Louisiana to the next level in supercomputing. It will also allow LSU to prepare students and faculty for the next generation of high-performance supercomputers.

Parallel computing expert Marc Snir, a major contributor to the Message Passing Interface, has been named the recipient of this year's IEEE Computer Society Seymour Cray Computer Engineering Award. Snir is director of the Mathematics and Computer Science Division at Argonne National Laboratory and the Michael Faiman and Saburo Muroga Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), where he headed the Computer Science Department from 2001 to 2007. He is currently pursuing research in programming environments for high-performance computing.

Chancellor Pradeep K. Khosla will today announce a five-year, $20 million award from the National Science Foundation to support an innovative program of research and education on how interactions between air and sea alter the chemistry of the atmosphere to influence climate. The grant will support the Center for Aerosol Impacts on Climate and the Environment (CAICE), led by the University of California, San Diego, which will leverage the expertise of top scientists from nine universities to understand how particles released from the ocean influence the environment—from local water supplies to global climate.

David E. Hudak, Ph.D., has joined XSEDE as the new Industry Relations Manager. Hudak earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics from Bowling Green State University and holds a master's and doctoral degrees in Computer Engineering from the University of Michigan. His doctoral work was on compilation of parallel loops to reduce interprocessor communication, using machines like an nCube, an Encore Multimax, and BBN TC2000. Currently, he is the program director for Cyberinfrastructure and Software Development at the Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC) working on various aspects of HPC parallel application development - technologies, techniques and tools. Hudak can be reached at dhudak@osc.edu.