Calling all of our STEM graduate students!! YOU have ideas … we’ve heard many of them. You’ve shared them with us in meetings, at conferences like the PROMISE SSI, on the walkways of our campuses, and in our offices. Now it’s time to get those ideas out to a national audience, and receive money if your submission is chosen!  You have to be in it to win it!

Deadline Apr. 15, 2013

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The following message comes from Dr. Jessie DeAro, national Program Director at the National Science Foundation for all of the AGEPs in the US.  (PROMISE is Maryland’s AGEP, one of more than 20 AGEPs nation-wide.)

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Calling Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) Graduate Students:

Have you ever thought of ways to improve STEM graduate education? Do you have a creative idea regarding graduate training? If so, NSF wants to hear from you!

The National Science Foundation Innovation in Graduate Education Challenge is calling for entries from currently enrolled STEM graduate students and teams. They are invited to submit innovative ideas to prepare today’s graduate students for tomorrow’s opportunities and challenges. Entries are solicited for ideas with the potential to improve graduate education and professional development. Ideas can be directed toward students, faculty, departments, institutions, professional societies, and/or federal agencies. Winning ideas will be shared widely and winners will receive prizes between $1000 and $3000.

FROM THE WEBSITE:

Be sure to include the following elements in your submission:

1. The title of your submission (150 characters or less)
2. The issue in graduate education you wish to address
3. Your solution or idea
4. How your idea will change graduate education

 DETAILS:

• Who: Currently enrolled STEM graduate students (see additional eligibility criteria) [PROMISE note: YES, Social Sciences and STEM Education research areas are eligible. Students must be U.S. Citizens or Permanent Residents. See pages 6-11 in the guide for eligible disciplines.]
• What: A 1000 to 1500 word submission responding to this challenge
• Where: Submission made to https://production.skild.com/skild2/NSF-EdChallenge/loginPage.action
• When: Entries must be submitted by 11:59PM Pacific Time on April 15, 2013

• For more information and to enter the challenge, go to www.nsf.gov/gradchallenge/
• Entry deadline is April 15^th! Make your voice heard on STEM graduate education!
• Like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter  @GradEdChallenge
• Send questions to GradChallenge@NSF.gov

UMBC CSEE department members submitted a number of #ifihadglass posts hoping to get an invitation to pre-order a Google Glass device. Several came from the UMBC Ebiquity Lab including this one that builds on our work with context-aware mobile phones.

Reports are that as many as 8,000 of the submitted ideas will be invited to the first round of pre-orders. To get a rough idea of our odds, I tried using Google and Bing searches to estimate the number of submissions. A general search for pages with the #ifihadglass tag returned 249K hits on Google. Of these 21K were from twitter and less than 4K from Google+. I’m not sure which of the twitter and Google+ posts get indexed and how long it takes, but I do know that our entry above did not show up in the results. Bing reported 171K results for a search on the hash tag, but our post was not among them. I tried the native search services on both Twitter and Google+, but these are oriented toward delivering a stream of new results and neither gives an estimate of the total number of results. I suppose one could do this for Twitter using their custom search API, but even then I am not sure how accurately one could estimate the total number of matching tweets.

Can anyone suggest how to easily estimate the number of #ifihadglass posts on twitter and Google+?