By Rob Mitchum // March 15, 2013
A few weeks ago, we urged readers to vote in the Bloomberg Mayors Challenge for the City of Chicago’s entry, a collaboration with the Urban Center for Computation and Data called the SmartData Platform. This week, the project received good news as it was chosen for a $1 million grant from Bloomberg Philanthropies to launch the project, one of five proposals to receive funding from the original pool of 305 applications. The SmartData platform will put city datasets — like those that can found on the city’s data portal — to work in making the city run more effectively and efficiently, and the UrbanCCD will help provide the computational expertise and tools to extract the maximum potential from the data. The new open-source platform is considered the next iteration of the WindyGrid system currently used internally by the city, which was discussed by Chicago’s Chief Data Officer Brett Goldstein at the recent Urban Sciences Research Coordination Network workshop.
Chicago and the other Bloomberg winners were covered by the New York Times, the Chicago Sun-Times, Crain’s Chicago Business, NBC Chicago, ABC Chicago, The Atlantic Cities.
THE PRESIDENT COMES TO ARGONNE
The security at Argonne National Laboratory will be even tighter than usual today as President Barack Obama visits to deliver a speech on the subjects of energy and climate change. The Presidential visit comes just months after the announcement of the Argonne “Battery Hub,” a $155 million project that’s part of the national Joint Center for Energy Storage Research. But President Obama’s speech will also come at a time where national laboratories such as Argonne face budget cuts due to the federal sequestration. If you want to see what the President says about these pressing topics, tune into White House Live at 1:30 p.m. Central time.
OTHER NEWS IN COMPUTATIONAL SCIENCE
Next month will feature a lot of exciting CI-affiliated events. On April 3rd, Senior Fellow Gregory Voth will deliver a lunchtime talk in downtown Chicago on “Molecular Modeling: A Window to the Biochemical World” (register here). The 2013 edition of the GlobusWorld meeting runs from April 16-18 at Argonne, and registration for the conference and hotel rooms is currently open. Finally, the Computation Institute will host the inaugural Day of the Beagle symposium on April 23rd, celebrating the groundbreaking biology and medicine research performed on the Beagle supercomputer in its first year of operation.
The first supercomputer in the country of Jordan was built with somewhat unusual components: the processors from Playstation 3 video game consoles. As the article discusses, it follows a US Air Force supercomputer in using video game parts for high-performance computing.
Two visions of the future of computing received attention in recent weeks. A special issue of Science put the spotlight on quantum computing and recent experiments that move it closer to real-world application, and a feature on the new Nova Next website speculated on how synthetic biology could someday create computers made up of biological components.
“The Internet of Things” is catching on as a tech/computing buzzword, and in this video for the business news site Quartz, Robert Mawrey of ioBridge uses a fresh cup of coffee to explain why might soon want our appliances to send and receive tweets.