Computing Community Consortium Blog

The goal of the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is to catalyze the computing research community to debate longer range, more audacious research challenges; to build consensus around research visions; to evolve the most promising visions toward clearly defined initiatives; and to work with the funding organizations to move challenges and visions toward funding initiatives. The purpose of this blog is to provide a more immediate, online mechanism for dissemination of visioning concepts and community discussion/debate about them.


Archive for September, 2020

 

NSF Distinguished Lecture: Enabling the quantum revolution- pioneering advances to achieve quantum computing & impact at scale

September 30th, 2020 / in Announcements, NSF, research horizons, Research News / by Helen Wright

Krysta Svore, Microsoft, will present “Enabling the quantum revolution- pioneering advances to achieve quantum computing & impact at scale,” part of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Computer & Information Science & Engineering (CISE) Distinguished Lecture Series on October 8th, 2020, from 11:00AM to 12:00PM ET. Dr. Krysta Svore is General Manager of Quantum Systems at Microsoft. She believes empowering people with the power of quantum computing, today and tomorrow, will be one of the greatest revolutionary steps in our history. She leads a team dedicated to realizing a commercial-scale quantum computing system and ecosystem to solve today’s unsolvable problems. She spent her early years at Microsoft developing machine-learning methods for web applications, including ranking, classification, […]

Catalyzing Computing Podcast Episode 27 – Global Security and Graph Analytics with Nadya Bliss (Part 1)

September 28th, 2020 / in podcast / by Khari Douglas

A new episode of the Computing Community Consortium‘s (CCC) podcast, Catalyzing Computing, is now available. In this episode, Khari Douglas interviews Dr. Nadya Bliss, the Executive Director of Arizona State’s Global Security Initiative and a CCC Council Member. Before joining ASU in 2012, Bliss spent 10 years at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory, most recently as a founding group leader of the Computing and Analytics Group. In this episode, she discusses her time at Lincoln Lab, what a federally funded Research and Development Center does, and the history of graph analytics. You can stream the episode in the embedded player below or find it on Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Google Play | Blubrry | iHeartRadio | Youtube. If you are interested in appearing […]

Applying Mathematics and Computer Science to Everyday Life – Anecdotes from Donald Knuth and Robert Tarjan

September 25th, 2020 / in computer history, conferences / by Khari Douglas

On day two of the Virtual Heidelberg Laureate Forum (HLF) 2020, Robert Endre Tarjan and Donald Ervin Knuth engaged in a freewheeling conversation about mathematics, computer science, and art. Donald Knuth was the 1974 ACM A.M. Turing Award winner for “for his major contributions to the analysis of algorithms and the design of programming languages, and in particular for his contributions to the ‘art of computer programming’ through his well-known books in a continuous series by this title.” Robert Tarjan won the Nevanlinna Prize in 1982 “for devising near-optimal algorithms for many graph-theoretic and geometric problems for the development and exploitation of data structures supporting efficient algorithms, and for contributing several algorithmic analyses of striking profundity […]

What Role Can Computing Play in Battling the COVID-19 Pandemic?

September 24th, 2020 / in conferences, COVID / by Khari Douglas

How can computing technology impact global health, particularly with regards to the COVID-19 pandemic? Shwetak Patel, 2018 ACM Prize in Computing winner and Computing Community Consortium (CCC) council member, addressed this question on the second day of the Virtual Heidelberg Laureate Forum (HLF) 2020. Patel, an entrepreneur and professor of computer science at the University of Washington, won the 2018 Prize for “contributions to creative and practical sensing systems for sustainability and health.” During his presentation, Patel highlighted a few of the use cases of computing technology on healthcare: for instance, AI has improved screening and diagnostic capabilities by reading X-rays and radiology scans and the ubiquity of mobile phones makes them a great […]

Architecture Innovation Accelerates Artificial Intelligence

September 23rd, 2020 / in AI, conferences / by Khari Douglas

As part of the first day of the Virtual Heidelberg Laureate Forum (HLF) David A. Patterson, who won the 2017 ACM A.M Turing Award “for pioneering a systematic, quantitative approach to the design and evaluation of computer architectures with enduring impact on the microprocessor industry,” shared a presentation titled Architecture Innovation Accelerates Artificial Intelligence.  To begin, Patterson gave a brief overview of the history of AI: it started with top-down approaches where a programmer would attempt to describe all the rules with the proper logic for the machine, but other researchers argued that was impossible and instead advocated for a bottom up approach where you feed the machine data and it learns for itself, i.e. machine […]

A General-Audience Talk: How Computing May Change Our World

September 22nd, 2020 / in Announcements, CCC, CRA, research horizons, Research News / by Helen Wright

While the Computing Research Association’s Computing Community Consortium (CCC) works to catalyze the computing community for the public good, we have rarely prepared talks suitable for the non-computer-scientist public. Fortunately, CCC Chair Emeritus Mark D. Hill of the University of Wisconsin-Madison recently prepared a well-received general-audience talk for Participatory Learning And Teaching Organization (PLATO), a senior organization that arranges informative lectures, classes, and field trips, all virtual now. Prof. Hill’s one-hour talk has the immodest title “How Computing May Change Our World” (YouTube Video & Slide PDF). It discusses that, while computing has already changed how we communicate, work, and play, more big impacts are afoot. Prof. Hill gives insight […]