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...

This paper presents a grand challenge for Digital Archaeology of a different kind: it is not technical in and of itself, it does not seek out technological solutions for archaeological problems, it does not propose new digital tools or digital methodologies as such. Instead, it proposes a broader challenge, one which addresses the very stuff of archaeology: an understanding of how digital techn...

Engineering complex service-oriented systems presents grand challenges due to their great complexity, volatility, and uncertainty in their rapidly evolving technology and social contexts. It demands an effective engineering approach in order to satisfy the needs of service economics. This paper proposes an approach called Organic Aggregation Service Engineering Framework (OASEF). Experience fro...

This paper outlines the central role a range of human language technologies play in the emerging discipline of knowledge management. We articulate several grand challenges, illustrate some early successes, and recommend areas of continued research.

Due to continuous improvements of semiconductor technologies new challenges for the design of highly integrated system-on-chip (SoC) solutions have arisen. Systems-on-Chip provide an implementation platform for many applications, and will revolutionize the design of future electronic systems. In this contribution we focus on several important challenges and unsolved problems concerning SoC desi...

The computational chemistry and cheminformatics community faces many challenges to advancing the state of the art. We discuss three of those challenges here: accurately estimating the contribution of entropy to ligand binding; reliably estimating the uncertainties in model predictions for new molecules; and being able to effectively curate the ever-expanding literature and commercial databases ...