Congratulations to David Crandall for his NSF CAREER Award! The Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program is a Foundation-wide activity that offers the National Science Foundation's most prestigious awards in support of junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education and the integration of education and research within the context of the mission of their organizations.  David's project Observing the world through the lenses of social media will lay the foundation for using visual social media as a new source of observational data for a variety of scientific disciplines by investigating the algorithms and technologies needed for mining large collections of photographs and noisy metadata to draw inferences about the physical world. "Every day, millions of people across the world take photos and upload them to social media websites," David observes. "Their goal is to share photos with friends and others, but collectively they are creating vast repositories of visual information about the world and how it looked across time and space. Aggregated together, these photos could provide new sources of observational data for use in disciplines like biology, earth science, social science or history." More...