The Quantum Pontiff

NSF Expeditions Awarded

Posted by Dave Bacon on August 18, 2008
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“Expeditions in Computing awards” are ten million dollar NSF grants from the Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering to pursue long-term research agendas. My favorite kinds of projects: high risk, high reward, and long term. Today the first four award winners have been announced. The winning programs are

  • Open Programmable Mobile Internet 2020
  • The Molecular Programming Project
  • Understanding, Coping with and Benefiting from Intractibility
  • Computational Sustainability: Computational Methods for a Sustainable Environment, Economy and Society

Of note for the theoretical computer science crowd is the third of these, won by a Princeton area team (lead by Sanjeev Arora), which is going to establish a “Center for Intractability” at Princeton. Very cool. And now I know where to go if I ever need a traveling salesman.

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Comments

  1. #1 Chad Orzel
    August 18, 2008

    And now I know where to go if I ever need a traveling salesman.

    Yes, but what’s the most efficient way to get there?

  2. #2 Ian Durham
    August 19, 2008

    “Yes, but what’s the most efficient way to get there?”

    There isn’t one; the problem is intractable.

    P.S. It’s ‘intractability’ and not ‘intractibility.’

  3. #3 Eric Lund
    August 19, 2008

    “Yes, but what’s the most efficient way to get there?”

    There isn’t one; the problem is intractable.

    Of course there is a most efficient way to get there; the difficulty is identifying the route. Or more precisely: how to get there and visit your collaborators at umpteen other institutes all in the same trip.

  4. #4 Jon
    August 19, 2008

    with videoconferencing you don’t have to worry about getting there any more.