As part of Computer Science Education Week, Tom Kalil, Deputy Director for Technology and Innovation at The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), and Farnam Jahanian, Assistant Director of The National Science Foundation (NSF) for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE), share their thoughts on the White House blog about the importance of computer science for all students and what the government is doing about it. This week, we’re celebrating Computer Science Education Week (CS Ed Week), which highlights the importance of computer science in our education system.  To recognize CS Ed Week this year, we encourage everyone to participate in the Hour of Code. It’s an easy way […]

It was announced on December 9, 2013 that Yann LeCun from NYU will be heading a new research lab at Facebook focused on Artificial Intelligence.  LeCun posted on his Facebook page: Big news today! Facebook has created a new research laboratory with the ambitious, long-term goal of bringing about major advances in Artificial Intelligence. I am thrilled to announce that I have accepted the position of director of this new lab. I will remain a professor at New York University on a part-time basis, and will maintain research and teaching activities at NYU. Cade Metz of Wired has also reported on the news.  He shares, LeCun sits at the heart […]

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced the formal appointment of Dr. Philip E. Bourne as the First Associate Director for Data Science at the Institutes.  Francis S. Collins, Director of NIH said, Phil will lead an NIH-wide priority initiative to take better advantage of the exponential growth of biomedical research datasets, which is an area of critical importance to biomedical research. The era of ‘Big Data’ has arrived, and it is vital that the NIH play a major role in coordinating access to and analysis of many different data types that make up this revolution in biological information. This appointment is very exciting for the computing community, as it signals […]

Today, December 9, 2013,  is Grace Murray Hopper’s Birthday (she would be 107 years old) and the beginning of Computer Science Education Week.  These events are being commemorated and celebrated in many ways throughout the country.  Even President Obama is getting involved with his own video.  As he says, Don’t just buy a new videogame, make one.  Don’t just download the latest app, help design it.  Don’t just play on your phone, program it. Hadi Partovi is the founder of Code.org, the organization bringing us The Hour of Code, a way to engage every student in the country in computer science for one hour this week.  He says, If you […]

On December 5, 2013, the computer science department at Cornell University, along with Google and Microsoft, sponsored the Fred B. Schneider Symposium on Trustworthiness.  This was a day focused on issues of computing systems for trustworthiness.  It is fitting to honor Fred in this way, as much of the research in his academic career has been on issues of trustworthiness, from his work on concurrency, distributed systems, and fault tolerance, to formal methods and logic and later security. The day opened with a session on Cybersecurity, with talks from Jeannette Wing, Farnam Jahanian and Keith Marzullo.  Next was a session on Methodology, with talks from Barbara Liskov and Cliff Jones. […]

Computer Science Education Week is an annual program designed to show students of all ages the importance of computer science.  It is observed each year, in recognition of the birthday of computing pioneer Admiral Grace Murray Hopper (December 9, 1906).  This year, CSEdWeek is December 9-15, 2013. As reported in a previous blog post, Code.org is taking the lead this year and promoting the Hour of Code to bring computing to ALL students!  There are many ways to participate and to bring computing to others, through the online tutorials written for students of all levels to creating your own local event, with guidance here. To kickoff the week, Code.org is hosting Classroom Video Chats […]