Innovation and knowledge driven R&D: key developments

Jan 25, 2012

Bruxelles - European Parliament

The US Office of Naval Research Global together with Intelligence in Science (ISC) would like to invite you to a workshop at the European Parliament, on 25 January 2012. The keynote speech will be addressed by the Executive Director Office of Naval Research, Dr. Walter Jones. 

The seminar will cover three specific topics:

Theme 1: Cyber Security

International businesses trade goods and services in cyberspace, moving assets across the globe in seconds. In addition to facilitating trade in other sectors, cyberspace is itself a key sector of the global economy. Cyberspace has become an incubator for new forms of entrepreneurship, advances in technology, the spread of free speech, and new social networks that drive our economy and reflect our principles. The security and effective operation of critical civil infrastructure – including energy, banking and finance, transportation, and communications rely on cyberspace, industrial control systems, and information technology that may be vulnerable to disruption or exploitation.

The quality of human capital and the knowledge base in both the public and private sectors provides both the US and the EU with a strong foundation on which to build current and future cyber capabilities. Both the US and the EU have played a crucial role in building and leveraging the technological prowess of the private sector through investments in people, research, and technology.  The US and the EU will be able to embrace this spirit of entrepreneurship and work in partnership with these communities and institutions to succeed in developing future cyberspace activities.

Theme 2: Power and Energy

Interest in power and energy-related research over the last decade has intensified for a number of compelling reasons: rising oil prices coupled with the desire for energy independence, concern over our carbon footprint, grid expansion into new geographic and economic regions, the pervasive use of mobile electronics with increasing energy requirements and decreased size; just to list a few.   Drawing from a superior set of core competencies in the fields of electrical engineering, materials science, chemistry, mechanical engineering, biology, systems engineering, the EU and the USA have blazed an innovative trail through the field, both academically and industrially. 

Despite great strides, there remains a host of challenging problems across the topic, relating to energy capture and production, and in energy storage, energy conversion and distribution.  As many promising approaches stem from a cross-disciplinary tactic, collaboration continues to be an effective tool in developing innovative solutions to challenging problems in the field.  From a governmental perspective, it remains important to create a positive environment for such collaborations to grow and flourish, as they will likely yield positive societal and economic impacts, enjoyed by both current and future generations.

Theme 3: Computational and Cognitive Neural Science

Bottom up approaches to characterize and model categorization decisions are bringing insights into computational methods found in neurophysiology and promise applicability to machine learning. Information theory and neural encoding are receiving renewed interest from a number of disciplines, including interest in new memristive models of neural computation. New discoveries in intracellular information processing have yet to be fully appreciated or significantly applied.

http://www.iscintelligence.com/event.php?id=46