A few weeks ago, The Wall Street Journal posted the article, “The Tech That Will Change Your Life in 2015: Gadgets and Ideas With the Best Chance of Making an Impact … and What You Can Do to Prepare for Them.” It offered predictions on cutting edge tech trends for the new year. Here are some of the highlights: Windows 10: Scheduled for release in the fall “The beloved Start menu is resurrected and modernized, and multiple virtual desktops will improve multitasking.…you may want to wait for the great assortment of new Windows 10 PCs that will appear in late 2015.” Apple Watch: Debuting in the coming months “It will undoubtedly […]

The AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellows at the National Science Foundation (NSF) have organized a new seminar series on Data Science, Big Data, and Internet of Things. The series is a monthly one-hour informational presentation that is open for all to attend in person or online. Michael Franklin from UC Berkeley will be the inaugural speaker tomorrow, Wednesday January 21, from 11:30am to 12:30pm EST. Franklin is the Thomas M. Siebel Professor of Computer Science and Chair of the Computer Science Division of the EECS Department at UC Berkeley. He is director of the Berkeley AMPLab, a 70+ person effort fusing scalable computing, machine learning, and human computation to make sense […]

The National Science Foundation (NSF) Directorate for Computer & Information Science & Engineering (CISE) recently announced a new program called Critical Resilient Infrastructure Systems and Processes (CRISP). CRISP has an upcoming full proposal deadline of March 20, 2015 according to its solicitation. The following are few comments about CRISP from Gurdip Singh, Program Director in the Division of Computer and Network Systems (CISE/CNS). Critical Infrastructures supporting our national economy, health and security are interdependent and reliant on each other.  A system may rely to performance, security and correct functioning of others, and failure/degradation of any of these properties may propagate from one system to other.  The goal of the CRISP program is to explore approaches […]

The new class of Fellows for TED2015 has recently been released, and among the 21 “game-changing thinkers” are Laura Boykin, a biologist and Jonathan Home, a physicist. We’ve chosen to highlight them here because even though they have very different backgrounds and goals, both use advanced computing techniques to transform the world.   Laura is a biologist who uses genomics and supercomputing to tackle food security in sub-Saharan Africa. She’s especially interested in figuring out what to do about whiteflies, which are devastating local cassava crops, a staple food in many countries.       Jonathan is a physicist working to build a quantum computer, attempting to achieve high-precision control of […]

The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is out with its 2014 Fellows, 47 of its members from universities, corporations, and research labs being recognized “for their contributions to computing that are driving innovations across multiple domains and disciplines…including database mining and design; artificial intelligence and machine learning; cryptography and verification; Internet security and privacy; computer vision and medical imaging; electronic design automation; and human-computer interaction.” They join a distinguished set of colleagues honored since 1993. Check out 2014 Fellows, including our own Computing Community Consortium (CCC) council member Daniela Rus! Samson Abramsky University of Oxford For contributions to domains in logical form, game semantics, categorical quantum mechanics and contextual semantics Leslie Lamport Microsoft Research For […]

The next WATCH Talk is this Thursday, January 15, 12:00-1:00pm EDT. Salil Vadhan will discuss Differential Privacy: Theoretical and Practical Challenges. Dr. Salil Vadhan is the Vicky Joseph Professor of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics in the Harvard University School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and the Director of the Harvard Center for Research on Computation and Society. His research area is theoretical computer science, specifically computational complexity, cryptography, and differential privacy. Abstract   Differential Privacy is framework for enabling the analysis of privacy-sensitive datasets while ensuring that individual-specific information is not revealed.  The concept was developed in a body of work in theoretical computer science starting about a decade ago.   […]