The following entry is a special contribution to this blog from Hamidreza Chitsaz, Assistant Professor at Wayne State University. This year Hamidreza and Moslem Kazemi, Carnegie Mellon University organized a challenges and vision track at Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS 2013) on June 27th in Berlin, Germany.  The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) sponsored three challenges and vision best paper awards at Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) 2013, a premiere conference on robotics. The conference was held in Berlin, Germany June 24-28, at the Technische Universität Berlin. The best challenges and vision paper awards promote visioning and revolutionary novel ideas in robotics, on principles and applications that address the most difficult […]

The following is a special contribution to this blog from our Vice Chair Gregory Hager (Johns Hopkins University). In the following entry Greg reflects on the first annual PI meeting for the National Science Foundation’s Expeditions in Computing program held in May in Washington, DC. I had the privilege of attending the National Science Foundation (NSF) Expeditions in Computing program’s first annual PI meeting which took place on May 14 -16, 2013 in Washington, DC. In its most recent solicitation, CISE describes the Expeditions program as follows:  The Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) has created the Expeditions in Computing (Expeditions) program to provide the CISE research and education […]

The following entry is a special contribution to this blog from Douglas H. Fisher, Associate Professor of Computer Science at Vanderbilt University. This year Doug and Carla Gomes (Cornell University) are co-chairing the Computational Sustainability and Artificial Intelligence (AI) track at the Twenty-Seventh Conference on Artificial Intelligence on July 14-18, 2013 in Bellevue, Washington. In this entry, Doug highlights the upcoming Computing Community Consortium sponsored track. The Twenty-Seventh AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-13) convenes next week in Bellevue, Washington. For the third consecutive year there will be a special track on Computational Sustainability, a nascent and growing field of computing that is concerned with the application of computer science […]

The NSF has recently issued a new program solicitation- Networking Technology and Systems (NeTS: JUNO), Japan-US Network Opportunity: R&D for “Beyond Trillions of Objects.” According to the solicitation, the joint research and development program “addresses a critical subset of the issues that arise when environments with trillions of device and information objects are network-connected, as is expected to be the case by the year 2020. This trend will require novel approaches for network design and modeling, new technologies for network management and control in support of object mobility, and flexible networks with the speed, capacity and environmental characteristics needed to accommodate communications among objects in the emerging world. This program […]

Timothy B. Lee of The Washington Post reports on the death of Douglas Engelbart, inventor of the mouse, and why it took 30 years for the public to adopt the technology. “Engelbart created the first mouse prototype in 1963. He showed off the capabilities of his invention, and of software developed to make use of it, in a famous 1968 demonstration. As amazing as his demo was, it would take almost three decades for the mouse to reach a mass audience. Apple released the first successful mouse-based computer in 1984, but text-based DOS continued to dominate the industry until Microsoft developed tolerable versions of Windows in the early 1990s. The release of […]

On July 1, new talents were added to the ranks of both the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) and the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board (CSTB) of the National Research Council.  The CCC welcomes five new members to its Council and the CSTB added seven new board members. Joining the CCC Council are: Daniela Rus, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Mark Hill, University of Wisconsin – Madison Ross Whitaker, University of Utah Tal Rabin, IBM Limor Fix, Intel The new additions to the CSTB are: Robert F. Brammer, Brammer Technology, LLC Luiz André Barroso, Google, Inc. Edward Frank, Apple, Inc. Laura Haas (NAE), IBM Corporation Mark Horowitz (NAE), Stanford University Michael Kearns, University of Pennsylvania […]