President Barack Obama has announced his intent to nominate two new members to the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology Policy (PCAST).  The new appointees are J. Michael McQuade, Senior Vice President of Science and Technology at United Technologies Corporation and Susan L. Graham.  President Obama said, I am confident that these outstanding individuals will greatly serve the American people in their new roles and I look forward to working with them in the months and years to come. Graham is the current Chair of the Computing Community Consortium (CCC).  She has been a key leader with the CCC since its inception in 2006.  Graham is the Pehong Chen Distinguished Professor of […]

On November 12, 2013, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and the Networking and Information Technology R&D (NITRD) program held an event, Data to Knowledge to Action: Building New Partnerships, to showcase high-impact collaborations created as a result of the Big Data R&D Initiative and to further identify areas for expanded collaborations. John Holdren, Assistant to the President for Science and Technology, and Farnam Jahanian, Co-chair of the Subcommittee for NITRD and Assistant Director for the CISE Directorate at the National Science Foundation (NSF), opened the event with welcoming remarks and shared the progress made by Federal Agencies.  Tom Kalil, Deputy Director for Technology and Innovation at […]

A post this week in AmStatNews, the membership magazine of the American Statistical Association, is a ringing endorsement of CCC’s activities: “On the topic of Big Data and the statistical science community’s contention that the federal policymakers should be engaging statisticians more (yielding better science), one counterpart quipped that computer scientists have dominated the Big Data landscape for two reasons: their sheer numbers and the white papers generated from the Computing Research Association (CRA) Computing Community Consortium (CCC) “Indeed, it didn’t take much digging to see the influence of CCC white papers. For example, a set of slides posted to the CRA website shows the progression from the publishing of […]

On Tuesday, November 12, 2013, the first non-human rang the closing bell on the NASDAQ stock market. A robotic arm was selected to ring the bell to mark the launch of a new robotics stock index, ROBO-STOX, which is the first index to benchmark the value of robotics, automation and related technologies. Click here to watch the robotic arm in action at NASDAQ. Forbes.com announced the milestone event and additional details about the robotic arm equipped with a three-fingered gripper. They also included thoughts on the future of the robotics industry. The debate over the state of the robotics industry and its future continues – sell to academic labs or push […]

Code.org is putting CSEdWeek on steroids this year! My department, like many of yours, has traditionally run a programming contest and an open house in conjunction with Computer Science Education Week – the week of Grace Murray Hopper’s birthday each year. This year, Code.org has established a new, audacious goal:  have every student – every American, in fact – spend one hour learning to code!   A phenomenal new programming environment has been created to make this possible – students will learn about flow of control, etc., using a drag-and-drop interface, not by writing C or Java. This is a GREAT OPPORTUNITY for you to get involved with K-12 institutions in […]

Check out the webcast of the White House OSTP “Big Data” event, November 12, 2013 beginning at 1 p.m. ET, 10 a.m. PT. Webcast here: http://live.science360.gov/1/ Agenda (pdf) is linked from that page, but also here: http://tinyurl.com/OSTP-BD