44 JPT • MARCH 2012 Editor’s note: This is the fifth in a series of articles on the great challenges facing the oil and gas industry as outlined by the SPE Research and Development (R&D) Committee. The R&D challenges comprise broad upstream business needs: increasing recovery factors, in-situ molecular manipulation, carbon capture and sequestration, produced water management, higher resolution ...

This article is a critique of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering’s report, Grand Challenges for Engineering, based upon the “technocratic view” of progress as defined by historian Leo Marx and as exemplified by the public works of Robert Moses, including the 1964 World’s Fair, as well as technological determinist narratives on the digital age drawn from contemporary culture. While the soc...

Copyright is held by the author/owner(s). CHI’13 Workshop on Grand Challenges in Text Entry, April 28, 2013, Paris, France. Abstract Current eye-typing systems are suffering from the needed dwell timeout which limits the possible entry rate. In this position paper we discuss how the usage of eye-traces on on-screen keyboards could be used for almost dwell timeout free gaze based communication. ...

This paper starts with the assertion that the way physical objects are currently transported, handled, stored, realized, supplied, and used throughout the world is unsustainable economically, environmentally, and socially. Evidence supporting this assertion is exposed through a set of key unsustainability symptoms. Then, the paper expresses the goal to revert this situation, thus meeting the gl...

R ecent technological advances have enabled the significant growth of cyberspace, which is transforming the way citizens, corporations, and governments interact, collaborate, and conduct business. At the same time, our heavy dependence on various digital infrastructures, including the Internet, has made them strategic national assets—like land, water, and airspace—that must be safeguarded to en...

In this chapter, we give an overview of what ontologies are and how they can be used. We discuss the impact of the expressiveness, the number of domain elements, the community size, the conceptual dynamics, and other variables on the feasibility of an ontology project. Then, we break down the general promise of ontologies of facilitating the exchange and usage of knowledge to six distinct techn...

Civic hackathons have become a popular, experimental process through which to promote public access to open government data and enable innovative civic uses for the information. The International Space Apps Challenge, led by NASA, is a high-profile event, promoting the use of space-derived data with the aim of contributing solutions to 'grand challenges' such as environmental sustainability. Ce...

1 Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA 2 Energy Center and Laboratory of Molecular Simulation, Institut des Sciences et Ingénierie Chimiques, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland 3 Department of Earth and Environmental Engineering, Lenfest Center for Sustainable Energy, Columbia University, Ne...

1 This is one of a number of proposals being discussed in the framework of the UK 'Grand Challenges' initiative of the UK computing research committee (UKCRC).