Office of Science and Technology Policy Blog

A group of leading researchers were honored yesterday at the White House as recipients of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), which is the highest honor bestowed by the United States Government on science and engineering professionals in the early stages of their independent research careers. After receiving their awards in a ceremony at the U.S. Department of Agriculture with agency officials, friends, and relatives—a ceremony keynoted by OSTP Director John Holdren—the group of 102 ambitious scientists and engineers were greeted at the White House by President Obama who thanked them for their outstanding achievements.

Freely available data from the U.S. Government is an important national resource, serving as fuel for entrepreneurship, innovation, scientific discovery, and other public benefits. According to a recent report, open data can generate more than $3 trillion a year in additional value in key sectors of the global economy, including education, health, transportation, and electricity.

To further support Federal agency efforts such as these, the Office of Science and Technology Policy last month issued a Request for Information seeking public input on ways to provide greater incentives to Federal agencies to relinquish or share spectrum for wireless broadband or other innovative commercial uses to address the ever-growing commercial demand. An array of stakeholders submitted comments, which will inform a forthcoming report the White House Spectrum Policy Team will deliver to the President.

As consumers surge to Healthcare.gov on the last day of open enrollment, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy’s #GeeksGetCovered initiative continues to focus on raising awareness, sharing stories, and encouraging healthcare enrollment among geeks, innovators, and entrepreneurs. As part of the effort, we recently caught up with Seattle-based entrepreneur Galen Ward, who founded the real estate website Estately in 2006.

Today, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) approved its Working Group II report on climate change “Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability”— the second installment of the group’s full Fifth Assessment Report. Upon the report’s approval, John P. Holdren, Assistant to the President for Science & Technology and Director of the White House Office of Science & Technology Policy, issued a statement.

Are you a talented data scientist or engineer? Or, a data geek, tech-savvy designer, or entrepreneur ready to lend your talents and expertise to help transform how government works for the people it serves? Then we want you to consider joining the ranks of the Presidential Innovation Fellows.

While we work year-round on open government efforts, this week we are excited to highlight achievements and progress made on open government goals.

In a memorandum released today, OSTP Director John P. Holdren directs Federal agencies to develop policies that will improve the management of and access to scientific collections they own or support. Scientific collections are assemblies of physical objects such as drilling cores from the ocean floor and glaciers, seeds, space rocks, cells, mineral samples, fossils, and more.

On March 17, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, the Data & Society Research Institute, and New York University co-hosted the second in a series of public events focused on big data that OSTP is co-hosting with academic institutions across the country.

Researchers across our Nation’s Federal labs are doing important work in an array of domains—from biomedicine, robotics, and epidemiology, to Earth observations, ocean science, and nanotechnology. It’s our job to help ensure that Federal interagency research funding is awarded to the best a researcher applicants, while minimizing unnecessary paper work and unclear requirements.

This week, we are happy to be joining with educators, students, and technologists worldwide to recognize and celebrate Open Education Week. Using advanced technology to dramatically expand the quality and reach of education has long been a key priority for the Obama Administration.

Today, NASA announced that it’s asteroid hunting season. The Asteroid Data Hunter challenge is a $35,000 series of competitions to help identify asteroids in images taken from ground-based telescopes. The competition – which launches on March 17th and runs through August – focuses on developing new algorithms to significant improve asteroid identification software. T

President Obama today welcomed the 40 student finalists of the 2014 Intel Science Talent Search to the White House. These extraordinary high schoolers—representing 20 states—are in Washington, DC, to participate in the final competitive judging of their innovative research projects in cutting-edge fields of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM).

On March 3, the White House Office of Science and Technology policy (OSTP) and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) co-hosted a thought-provoking conference about the state of the art in big-data analytics and privacy technologies. The conference attracted some of the top technologists working on leading-edge big data projects in a range of important areas, including healthcare, genomics, education, and transportation, as well as privacy-enhancing technologies.