The Human Frontier Science Program (HFSP) is an international funding program that supports postdoctoral fellowships for advanced training in laboratories abroad, and collaborative research in the form of grants for teams of scientists in different countries. The financial contribution for the annual $60 million program comes from Australia, Canada, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, the Republic of Korea, New Zealand, Norway, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, the United States of America, and the European Union.

The following article is the summary of a presentation given by the author at the Embassy of Austria in Washington, DC, on the occasion of a joint event between the Office of Science & Technology (OST) and the DC Chapter of the Association of Austrian Scientists and Scholars in North America (ASciNA) on June 18, 2008.

We are living in an increasingly data-driven world. Companies are amassing larger and larger data repositories about their customers in the form of loyalty cards, cookies, or crawlers. This puts pressure on decision makers to extract new and actionable knowledge from that data. Data Mining is a relatively young discipline that has roots in Statistics, Machine Learning, and Visualization and its goal is the discovery of interesting (i.e., non-trivial, previously unknown, and potentially useful) knowledge from huge amounts of data.

IIASA lunch

The Austrian Ambassador to the United States Eva Nowotny hosted a luncheon on June 16, 2008, to introduce IIASA's new Acting Director Sten Nilsson and Director Designate Detlof von Winterfeldt to science and policy leaders in the Washington community. Guests included officials from the National Science Foundation, the National Academy of Sciences, the World Bank, private foundations, and Federal agencies.

Detlof von Winterfeldt, a former research scholar at IIASA in the 1970s, and currently professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering and director of the Homeland Security Center for Risk and Economic Analysis of Terrorism Events (CREATE) at the University of Southern California, will become IIASA’s ninth director on January 1, 2009. He emphasized that a closer relationship with policy makers will be of particular importance for IIASA.

Participants welcomed the creation of an endowment fund for IIASA. Its aim is to open up additional resources from the private sector for IIASA’s interdisciplinary research.

Public Screening of Germany-Austria Soccer Game of the EURO 2008

On Monday, June 16, 2008, the OST in cooperation with the German Goethe Institut in Washington organized a public viewing of the legendary encounter of the two countries’ soccer teams on the occasion of the EURO 2008, taking place this month in Austria and Switzerland.

Thirty years after Cordóba 1978, many German, Austrian, and some American soccer fans sneaked out of their offices early to witness this game on the big screen. German beer and Austrian wine provided by the organizers created an authentic stadium-like atmosphere far from home.

After 90 minutes of hope and prayer, the decision was made in favor of our German neighbors who won the game with a final score of 1–0, eliminating the last hopes of the Austrians to ascend into the quarter finals. Nevertheless, this rather unusual joint cooperation provided all attendees with a memorable occasion to participate in the EURO 2008, even far away from home. A news team from the German TV channel n-tv covered the event. To see the clip, click here.

Members of the OST and the Goethe Institut