A number of news organizations reported last week on the announcement of a $3 million prize for predicting hospitalizations.  It’s just one in a series of open algorithm-creation contests startup company Kaggle is helping to run to help incentivize predictive analytics.  As The Wall Street Journal reported: Amid a larger effort to use medical data to improve health care, one company is trying something new:  offering $3 million in prize money for the algorithm that can best predict when people are likely to be sent to the hospital. The algorithm contest, the largest of its kind so far, is part of a trend toward using such prizes to help find the best answers […]

Nearly two dozen IT companies are announcing today a new nonprofit organization called the Open Networking Foundation (ONF), dedicated to promoting the development and use of Software-Defined Networking (SDN) technologies like OpenFlow. Deutsche Telekom, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Verizon, and Yahoo! are founding partners, and another 17 companies — including major equipment vendors, networking and virtualization software suppliers, and chip technology providers — are members. From the official press release: In the past two decades, enormous innovation has taken place on top of the Internet architecture. Email, e-commerce, search, social networks, cloud computing, and the web as we know it are all good examples. While networking technologies have also evolved in this time, the […]

As we’ve previously blogged here, the CCC has sponsored three Challenges & Visions Sessions at computing research conferences over the past year, seeking to give time and attention to “wacky ideas” that may not otherwise make it through a conference’s normal reviewing process.  These sessions — run on an experimental basis, to assess their value to the conferences as well as the broader research community — have been quite successful in elevating promising visions and generating vigorous discussions.  Consequently, the CCC is announcing today a call for additional Challenges & Visions Sessions: The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is sponsoring an initiative to bring special “Challenges and Visions” tracks to leading computer […]

CCC Council chair Ed Lazowska is one of eight columnists featured in a New York Times “Room for Debate” essay series on education.  Lazowska says: “There are a few facts about education, employability and economic growth that we should keep in mind. “A balanced education serves you best … “The further out you are from college graduation, the less your success is attributable to the field in which you majored, and the more your success is attributable to a set of abilities imparted by any top-tier bachelor’s-level education … “But let us not fool ourselves about what fields offer job opportunities, create jobs for others and drive the economy … […]

The following is a special contribution to this blog by CCC Council member Stephanie Forrest.  She reports on her department’s opinions about PostDocs in computer science.  We welcome your thoughts about Stephanie’s summary — as well as the broader PostDoc issue — below or at http://cra.org/postdocs.  (More information about the CRA-facilitated conversation on CS PostDocs is available here.) The University of New Mexico’s Computer Science Department has considerable experience training post-doctoral fellows because of its long tradition in interdisciplinary research.  We discussed the pros and cons of post-doctoral fellows at a recent Faculty meeting.  Several of us have had positive experiences with post-docs — they have enriched our department during their stay — and […]

Over 280 leading networking researchers from around the country gathered this week for the 10th GENI Engineering Conference (GEC).  The meeting — co-hosted by the Polytechnic University of Puerto Rico and the University of Puerto Rico — came at a critical time in the evolution of the GENI Project:  out of the “startup phase,” the GENI Project Office (GPO) is seeking to substantially ramp up experimentation in the coming year, all the while enhancing build-outs in campuses and backbones throughout the nation as part of the growing meso-scale GENI. (As we’ve blogged in this space before, the GENI Project was first funded by NSF in 2007 — to take a […]