Three mathematics and science professors called on the U.S. government to support institutional programs that have succeeded in attracting and retaining minority students during a recent Congressional briefing session. Arizona State University professor Carlos Castillo-Chavez said that most of the Hispanic and American-Indian students who participate in the university’s math and science honors program, a [...]

Aberdeen University computer scientist Kees van Deemter is creating a system that would be able to understand the meaning of vague phrases. Vagueness is a key part of everyday communication, according to van Deemter, who notes that advertisers might use a word such as “powerful” to describe a product, or politicians might use the term [...]

U.S. President Barack Obama has proposed spending $3.7 billion on science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education in his 2011 budget, including increasing funding of K-12 education by nearly 40 percent from a year ago to $1 billion. Obama’s plan also calls for tripling the number of U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowships [...]

The United States remains the world’s leader in science and technology, based on factors such as gross dollars spent, relative spending on research, research articles published, and patents granted, according to the National Science Board’s biennial report on science and engineering. The report says the U.S. accounted for nearly one third of the $1.1 trillion [...]

A national cloud computing network will be made available to Australian researchers, as will $50 million toward the development of a petabyte supercomputer and data network within three to five years. “Everything is heading toward data-intensive science, and effective network access speeds will go through the roof,” says Lindsay Botten, director of the National Computational [...]

Scientists are using a grid network managed by EGEE-III to carry out advanced number crunching and extensive simulations. EGEE-III is the third phase of a European Union-funded project to create an infrastructure supporting European researchers using grid computing resources. “We take computing and storage resources owned by individual institutions and provide a middleware layer of [...]

U.S. President Obama has announced a $250 million effort to improve science and mathematics instruction in order to help the United States compete with economic rivals. The initiative will prepare more than 10,000 new math and science school teachers and provide on-the-job training for an additional 100,000 teachers over the next five years. The plan [...]

In an article for Xconomy, University of Washington professor Ed Lazowska identifies seven game-changing computer science advancements that emerged over the past decade and speculates on seven others to come in the years ahead. The technologies that came to the fore in the first decade of the 21st century–search, digital media, e-commerce, cloud computing, etc.–are [...]

A University of Washington (UW) study indicates that the stereotype of computer scientists as geeks who stay up all night coding and have no social life may be driving women away from careers in computer science. The study found that the stereotype can be invoked just by the appearance of the classroom or work environment. [...]

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researcher Mitchel Resnick and colleagues at the MIT Media Lab have enjoyed great success with Scratch, a computer programming language geared toward children ages eight to 16. Scratch users write code by connecting graphical blocks together. Concurrent with the launch of Scratch two years ago was the rollout of the [...]