The Computing Community Consortium is seeking community input to better understand the potential needs and payoff for additional investments in mid-scale infrastructure for computing research. NSF spends significantly less on shared research infrastructure for computing research than it does for many other fields. By “shared research infrastructure” we mean experimental hardware and/or software and associated instrumentation that serves a significant portion of the research community (versus a small set of investigators). In other fields, such shared research infrastructure includes equipment such as telescopes, ocean observatories, supercomputers, and field stations. We specifically are interested in “mid-scale” infrastructure investments, defined as investments of over $4 million but under $100 million. GENI, PlanetLab, […]

Vinton Cerf, Robert Kahn, Sir Tim Berners Lee, Marc Andreessen, and Louis Pouzin were awarded the inaugural Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering today at the Royal Academy of Engineering.  This new £1million global prize recognizes outstanding advances in engineering that have changed the world and benefited humanity – celebrating the best and also serving to illuminate the sheer excitement of modern engineering. The work of these five pioneers is recognized as revolutionary for changing the way we communicate. According to the article:  Some 330 petabytes of data are estimated to be carried across its servers each year-  that’s enough capacity to transfer every character ever written in every book ever published 20 […]

On Wednesday, March 20, a new Robotics roadmap will be presented to the Congressional Caucus on Robotics. The presentation program will include: • Overview – Henrik Christensen • Manufacturing – Rethink Robotics – Rodney Brooks • Logistics – KIVA Systems/Amazon – Pete Wurman • Healthcare – Eksos Bionics – Nathan Harding The new Robotics roadmap, organized by the Robotics Virtual Organization, includes updates to the sections on manufacturing, healthcare/medical robotics, and services. In addition it has two new sections on defense and space applications in recognition of the important role that space and defense robotics has both to R&D but also as early adopters. The new report is a follow-up […]

The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) has announced Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers, Shafi Goldwasser and Silvio Micali, are recipients of the 2012 A.M. Turing Award. Their innovations became the gold standard for enabling secure internet transactions. The Turing award is widely considered the “Nobel Prize in Computing,” and carries a $250,000 prize, with financial support provided by Intel Corporation and Google Inc. According to the ACM press release, “Working together, they pioneered the field of provable security, which laid the mathematical foundations that made modern cryptography possible. By formalizing the concept that cryptographic security had to be computational rather than absolute, they created mathematical structures that turned cryptography from an art into a science. Their […]

The following was submitted by Farnam Jahanian, NSF Assistant Director for CISE. Dear Colleagues, CISE is pleased to announce the formation of a search committee for the Director of the Division of Computing and Communication Foundations (CCF). Dr. Susanne Hambrusch will be finishing her term as CCF Division Director at the end of this summer – we greatly appreciate her leadership and service to the CISE community over the last three years! Announcements for the search for her replacement can be found at http://www.nsf.gov/cise/news/2013-CCF-Annoucement.jsp and on USAJOBS at https://www.usajobs.gov/GetJob/ViewDetails/338606700?org=NSF. Please feel free to contact any of the following search committee members to nominate candidates; self-nominations are also invited: ·      Sarita Adve, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, sadve@illinois.edu, Co-chair […]

President Barack Obama, during his State of the Union address, discussed education and the revolution of industry, bringing it back to America. President Obama also discussed high school curriculum reform to better prepare students for tech jobs; in an effort to create more classes that focus on STEM, he mentioned rewarding schools which partner with higher education institutions and industry to create such classes. President Obama went on to discuss the importance of funding cyber-security research, especially regarding the security of our critical infrastructure. President Obama stated: We know hackers steal people’s identities and infiltrate private e-mail. We know foreign countries and companies swipe our corporate secrets. Now our enemies […]