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 […]

The following is a special contribution to this blog from Christos Papadimitriou, C. Lester Hogan Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of California at Berkeley.   Christos co-organized the Simons Institute Visions on the Theory of Computing Symposia, which was sponsored by the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) this past May.  Christos provides a retrospective look at each presentation from the Symposium below.  You can also view all of the presentations here.   “What Should a Computational Theory of Cortex Explain?” Leslie Valiant, Harvard University. Valiant started by remembering two neuroscience pioneers: Ramon y Cajal, who admired data and derided theory (except in physics); and David Marr […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) sponsored the Simons Institute Symposium on Visions of the Theory of Computing.  The three-day symposium brought together distinguished speakers and participants from the Bay Area and all over the world to celebrate both the excitement of fundamental research on the Theory of Computing, and the accomplishments and promise of computational research in effecting progress in other sciences — the two pillars of the Institute’s research agenda. More than 300 people were in attendance to hear these world-renown speakers.  You can view videos of the presentations here.

Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Northwestern University have conducted a study and found that moving common applications to the cloud can save significant amounts of energy.  The study is summarized in this report.  According to Scientific Computing, “The report looks at three common business applications – email, customer relationship management software, or CRM, and bundled productivity software (spreadsheets, file sharing, word processing, etc.). Moving these software applications from local computer systems to centralized cloud services could cut information technology energy consumption by up to 87 percent – about 23 billion kilowatt-hours. This is roughly the amount of electricity used each year by all the homes, businesses and industry in […]

Yesterday, Microsoft announced their Microsoft Research Faculty Fellowships and former Computing Innovation Fellow, Katrina Ligett is one of only seven recipients.  As Microsoft says, The time for new faculty members to take risks in research is early in their careers. However, early-career realities often get in the way. As any tenure-track academic knows, the first few years of one’s career can be a seemingly endless process of writing grant proposals. The Microsoft Research Faculty Fellowships liberate promising young researchers from this task, allowing them the freedom to conduct research to advance computer science in bold new directions with minimal distractions. Katrina was a member of the first cohort of Computing […]

Earlier this month, Gil Press of Forbes wrote A Very Short History Of Big Data.  The history in this article begins in 1944, but jumps every few years until 2008, when it seems Big Data hit the big time. The impact of efforts by the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) in that time frame were noted by Forbes, as they had previously been by the New York Times.  Both highlighted a CCC white paper co-authored by Randal Bryant (CMU), Randy Katz (UC Berkeley), and Ed Lazowska (University of Washington), “Big-Data Computing: Creating Revolutionary Breakthroughs in Commerce, Science, and Society.” Big Data has been a major theme of CCC’s over the years.  […]