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Grand Challenges Explorations Round 5: Now accepting Proposals

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is now accepting grant proposals for
Round 5 of Grand Challenges Explorations, a US $100 million initiative to
encourage unconventional global health solutions. Anyone can apply,
regardless of education or experience level.

Grant proposals are being accepted online at
http://www.grandchallenges.org/explorations until May 19,2010, on the
following topics:

New! Create Low-Cost Cell Phone-Based Applications for Priority Global
Health Conditions
NEW! Create New Technologies to Improve the Health of Mothers and Newborns

Create New Technologies for Contraception
Create New Ways to Protect Against Infectious Diseases

Initial grants will be $100,000 each, and projects showing promise will have
the opportunity to receive additional funding of up to $1 million US
Dollars. Full descriptions of the new topics and application instructions
are available at http://www.grandchallenges.org/explorations.

We are looking forward to receiving innovative ideas from scientists around
the world and from all scientific disciplines. If you don't submit a
proposal yourself, we hope you will forward this message to someone else who
might be interested.

Thank you for your commitment to solving the world's greatest health
challenges.


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Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

Guided by the belief that every life has equal value, the Bill & Melinda
Gates Foundation works to help all people lead healthy, productive lives. In
developing countries, it focuses on improving people's health and giving
them the chance to lift themselves out of hunger and extreme poverty. In the
United States, it seeks to ensure that all people - especially those with
the fewest resources - have access to the opportunities they need to succeed
in school and life. Based in Seattle, the foundation is led by CEO Jeff
Raikes and Co-chair William H. Gates Sr., under the direction of Bill and
Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett.

Workshop: The Twelve Keys to Successful Grant Writing

Dr. Robert Lowman, Associate Vice Chancellor for Research, will be conducting a workshop that presents twelve key concepts related to success in grant writing. Designed for the grant writer with limited experience, this workshop starts from the premise that nothing succeeds like a good idea. But there are other important ingredients of success, from assembling a winning team to achieving a strong match between the idea and a potential sponsor. The workshop stresses the importance of planning, and presents the sponsor as a potential ally, not an adversary.

This event is appropriate for faculty members and post-doctoral fellows in any discipline. Space is limited. Registration is required.

If you have questions regarding the workshop, please contact Jennifer Pruitt 962-7757 (jennifer_pruitt@unc.edu) for more details.

School of Public Health
Monday, April 5
1:30 to 5:00 p.m.
Rosenau Hall Room 133
Registration Required

School of Public Health
Thursday, April 8
1:00 to 4:30 p.m.
Rosenau Hall Room 133
Registration Required

Juicy Ideas 2010: A Software Contest for Students

Google is excited to support the Juicy Ideas competition again this year by hosting the winning team at company headquarters in Mountain View California in Summer 2010, where winners will also each receive an Android-powered phone.

Juicy Ideas 2010 is asking you: "What can you do with data?"

Useful data streams are published by governments, private companies, NGOs, and endless websites and we want to see how you can harness this data to benefit your community in the form of a software application. Submissions will be judged on their ability to disseminate data and benefit the community, on the usability of the application, and on the business potential of the idea.

This year's contest is open to communities where Google operates offices or datacenters in the US, and universities within 50 km of offices are invited to participate. We've also invited school from last year's Juicy Ideas to join again.

Ready? Form a team of 3-5 students at an eligible college or university.

Set? Research publicly available data, come up with a business plan for that data.

Juice! Create a software application that uses the data to benefit your community, and upload a demo video to Youtube. You'll be judged on the app and the video.


The contest period runs through April 11 2010, so get started at www.juicyideas.com!

Weiss Urban Livability Symposium

The Weiss Urban Livability Symposium
Sponsored by the Graduate School

INTERDISCIPLINARY APPROACHES TO COMMUNITY ACTIVISM THROUGH ENGAGED SCHOLARSHIP

Date: Thursday, March 18
Time: 5:30 -- 7:30pm
Location: Tate-Turner-Kuralt Auditorium in the School of Social Work, Pittsboro St., Carolina Campus

Symposium information: This Weiss Urban Livability Symposium brings together a group of university scholars and community professionals to discuss social, economic, and environmental issues of significance to North Carolina and how they engage those issues to solve problems in their communities. Panelists will share how they build relationships between academia and local communities to effect positive change and foster social justice.

Panelists:

* Altha Cravey, Professor of Geography, UNC-Chapel Hill
* Allan Parnell, UNC-Chapel Hill and Cedar Grove Institute for Sustainable Communities
* Gene Nichol, Professor of Law, Director of the UNC and Center on Poverty, Work, and Opportunity at UNC
* Gary Keuber, Durham urban activist and blogger, "Endangered Durham"
* Tes Thraves, Center for Environmental Farming Services: The Center for Environmental Farming Systems (CEFS)

Moderator: Donald Nonini, Professor of Anthropology, UNC.

Please refer to the attached save-the-date and check online
urbanlivability.org for more information and updates. Email questions or
rsvp to urbanlivability@unc.edu .

2010 Future Faculty Fellowship Program

The Future Faculty Fellowship Program (FFFP) is a 5-day, intensive, interdisciplinary program for senior-level graduate students, conducted by the Center for Faculty Excellence (CFE). The program was developed in collaboration with Student Government, the Graduate and Professional Student Federation, the Office of the Provost, and the Graduate School. It is designed to meet professional development goals by improving the instructional planning and teaching skills of new Teaching Fellows who are assigned to independently teach undergraduate courses at UNC-Chapel Hill and by preparing them to meet their future faculty responsibilities in research, service, and leadership.


The Spring 2010 FFFP will be May 12-14 and 17-18 in the Pleasants Family Assembly Room of Wilson Library. To apply for the program, graduate students should be directed to the application on the CFE website:

http://cfe.unc.edu/teaching/fffp/index.html.


The program is limited to 24 participants selected from the group of graduate students completing the application process, which includes an essay on why they want to participate in the program, a letter of recommendation from a faculty member, and some additional information about their experiences with teaching and learning. The deadline for submission of applications and faculty recommendation letters is March 17, 2010. Students will be notified of acceptance by March 22nd.


The FFFP will be repeated in August with an application deadline in mid-May.

Data Sciences Summer Institute

May 24 –July 2, 2010

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

The Mathematics, Algorithms and Tools for Data Analytics


The 3rd Annual Data Sciences Summer Institute (DSSI) will be held May 24-July 2 , 2010 on the campus of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). This 6-week long program will expose students to the mathematical foundations of Data Sciences, allow them to attend advanced tutorials and seminars on a diverse set of topics in this area given by leading experts in the field, and provide hands-on experience working on research projects on topics such as:

· Machine Learning approaches for Natural Language Understanding and Information Extraction

· Knowledge Discovery in Social and Information Networks

· Information Retrieval and Text Mining

· Computer Vision


Eligibility:

· College Junior or Senior Computer Science students (majors or minors) and beginning graduate students.

· Students should show strong academic performance and must have sufficient mathematical and programming experience.

· Applicants must currently be living in the United States as citizens, residents or Visa holders.

· Room, board and stipend will be provided to qualified students.

Find more information and the online application form (deadline March 31, 2010) for the Data Sciences Summer Institute at: http://mias.illinois.edu/DSSI


This program is funded by the Department of Homeland Security’s Center of Excellence—Command, Control, and Interoperability Center for Advanced Data Analysis (CCICADA) at UIUC’s Multimodal Information Access & Synthesis (MIAS) Center.