At the University of Tennessee, The Grand Challenge Scholar program operates in conjunction with the Honors Engineering Leadership minor (HELM) and emphasizes leadership training as part of interdisciplinary coursework preparing engineering students to work at the boundaries of their profession with business, entrepreneurship, ethics, and human behavior. We have formed a partnership with the De...

A grand challenge of the 21 century cosmology is to accurately estimate the cosmological parameters of our Universe. A major approach in estimating the cosmological parameters is to use the large scale matter distribution of the Universe. Galaxy surveys provide the means to map out cosmic large-scale structure in three dimensions. Information about galaxy locations is typically summarized in a ...

State investments in center-based school readiness programs for preschoolers (pre-K), whether targeted for poor children or universally implemented, have expanded more rapidly than evaluations of their effects. Given the current interest and continuing expansion of state funded pre-K, it is especially important to be clear about the nature of the available evidence for the effectiveness of such...

Educational data mining (EDM) and Learning analytics are still rather young research areas. The goal of this panel is to share different views on what major challenges researches need to address in EDM, learning analytics and related research areas including but not limited to User modeling, AI in Education, and Learning Sciences. The representatives of the corresponding communities are invited...

There are a variety of grand challenges for text extraction in scene videos by robots and users, e.g., heterogeneous background, varied text, nonuniform illumination, arbitrary motion and poor contrast. Most previous video text detection methods are investigated with local information, i.e., within individual frames, with limited performance. In this paper, we propose a unified tracking based t...

The latest multi-biometric grand challenge (MBGC 2008) sets up a new experiment in which near infrared (NIR) face videos containing partial faces are used as a probe set and the visual (VIS) images of full faces are used as the target set. This is challenging for two reasons: (1) it has to deal with partially occluded faces in the NIR videos, and (2) the matching is between heterogeneous NIR an...

One of Brazilian’s grand challenges in computer science research concerns a “Participative and universal access to knowledge for the Brazilian citizen”. In order to develop design solutions to address this challenge, we first need to understand these citizen’s abilities and the context in which they are immersed. For that, we have been conducting practices actively involving a group of represen...

I n the wake of the worst financial crisis since 1930, many countries face the challenge of creating a new economy model that relies less on financial services but more on production. Science therefore plays an increasingly important role to generate the knowledge that will eventually give rise to these new products. This coincides with the grand challenges of the 21 century: dealing with the e...

The impact of a discipline’s research is constrained by its ability to articulate compelling problems. Well-crafted problems are the foundation for mobilizing the effort, resources, and attention essential to scientific progress and broader impact. We argue that Information Systems (IS) scholars, individually and collectively, must develop the practice of articulating and engaging large-scale, ...

■ Abstract The past seven years have seen significant advances in computational simulations of convection and magnetic field generation in the Earth’s core. Although dynamically self-consistent models of the geodynamo have simulated magnetic fields that appear in some ways quite similar to the geomagnetic field, none are able to run in an Earth-like parameter regime because of the considerable ...