The National Science Foundation (NSF) Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) is pleased to announce a Distinguished Lecture on Wednesday, March 5, 2014 at 11:00 am (EST) by Owen Astrachan and Amy Briggs titled AP Computer Science Principles.  Astrachan is the Director of Undergraduate Studies in Computer Science and Professor of the Practice at Duke University where he has taught in four decades and two millennia. In addition to teaching computer science, he builds curricula and approaches to teaching intended for broad adoption and adaptation.  Briggs is Professor of Computer Science at Middlebury College in Vermont where she teaches undergraduate courses in introductory computer science, data structures, theory of computation, discrete […]

Computing is at the heart of one up-and-coming cultural trend – wearable technology. This emerging market is enabled by advances in computing, and it’s positioned to become a multi-billion dollar market in the near future. A report from BBC Research, Wearable Computing: Technologies, Applications, and Global Markets, projects the global market for wearable computing devices to grow to $30.2 billion by 2018. The consumer market is the fastest moving segment. Wearable computing encompasses everything from smart watches, activity monitors, to devices in clothing and accessories. The smart watch product category is projected to account for the largest single consumer market, generating more than $12.5 billion in global annual revenues in 2018. From […]

This week, President Barack Obama announced two new public-private Manufacturing Innovation Institutes and launched the first of four new Manufacturing Innovation Institute Competitions. The institutes will boost advanced manufacturing in the United States and increase high-quality jobs. One of the public-private institutes, the Digital Manufacturing and Design Innovation Institute (DMDI) is headquartered in Chicago, Illinois and spearheads a consortium of 73 companies, universities, nonprofits, and research labs. The partnership between world-leading manufacturing experts and cutting-edge software companies will develop enhanced digital capabilities to design and test new products, and reduce costs in manufacturing processes across multiple industries. From the White House website: “The country that gets new products to market faster […]

The National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering(CISE) will hold a one-day CAREER proposal writing workshop March 31, 2014 in Arlington, VA.  In addition to past programs that accepted CAREER proposals, this year, the STEM-CP: CE21 program is also accepting CAREER proposals. The goal of this workshop is to enable junior CAREER-eligible faculty to prepare competitive proposals for the NSF CAREER program.  Faculty members will have the opportunity to improve their skills in proposal writing, experience mock panel reviews, and interact with NSF program directors from the CISE divisions (ACI, CCF, CNS, and IIS), as well as with recent NSF CAREER awardees. The workshop is being hosted by the Computer […]

The CCC is charged with catalyzing and empowering the U.S. computing research community to articulate and advance major research directions for the field. To do so, the CCC needs truly visionary leaders — people with great ideas, sound judgment, and the willingness to work hard to see things to completion. Please help the computing community by nominating such people for the Council. For more information about the CCC, please visit http://cra.org/ccc and https://cccblog.org. The CCC is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) under a cooperative agreement with the Computing Research Association (CRA). The work of the CCC is carried out by an active and engaged Council, currently led by Susan Graham (University of California- Berkeley) as chair and Greg […]

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) announced the launch of the Big Mechanism program to develop automated technologies that will help explain the causes and effects that drive complicated systems. Paul Cohen, DARPA Program Manager says, Having big data about complicated economic, biological, neural and climate systems isn’t the same as understanding the dense webs of causes and effects—what we call the big mechanisms—in these systems. Unfortunately, what we know about big mechanisms is contained in enormous, fragmentary and sometimes contradictory literatures and databases, so no single human can understand a really complicated system in its entirety. Computers must help us. … Indeed, the Big Mechanism program might herald new ways to understand complicated […]