As a follow-on to the Smart America Challenge, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), in partnership with US Ignite, is launching the Global City Teams Challenge to advance the deployment of Internet of Things technologies within a smart city or community.  NIST hopes that the Challenge will encourage collaboration and the development of standards so that communities can benefit from the experience of others to improve efficiency and lower costs.  From the call, The Challenge will: Facilitate partnerships and interconnections among city and community planners and project managers so they can identify common issues Facilitate partnerships and interconnections among technology innovators/providers so that they form teams around specific issues such as […]

The mission of Computing Research Association’s (CRA) Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is to catalyze the computing research community and enable the pursuit of innovative, high-impact research.  CCC conducts activities that strengthen the research community, articulate compelling research visions, and align those visions with pressing national and global challenges. CCC communicates the importance of those visions to policymakers, government and industry stakeholders, the public, and the research community itself. In accordance with the mission, CCC is issuing a new call for proposals for workshops that will catalyze and enable innovative research at the frontiers of computing. From the solicitation: Successful activities will articulate new research visions, galvanize community interest in those visions, mobilize support for those visions from the […]

The following is a guest blog post from Gera Jochum, Communications Specialist for the Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Directorate at the National Science Foundation (NSF). A new video produced by the National Science Foundation showcases an innovative computer science curriculum that’s been a huge success in Los Angeles public schools and is now spreading across the nation. The video highlights the work of Jane Margolis, an educator and researcher at UCLA, who has dedicated her career to democratizing computer science education and addressing under-representation in the field. Her work inspires students from diverse backgrounds to study computer science and use their knowledge to help society. With support from […]

The following is a special contribution to this blog by CCC Council Member Ran Libeskind-Hadas and CRA Board Member Susanne Hambrusch, Co-Chairs of CRA-E. The CRA Education Committee’s (CRA-E) mission is to address society’s need for a continuous supply of talented and well-educated computing researchers.  The committee’s efforts include both research on the state of the “domestic student pipeline” and developing resources to maintain its health. The fraction of Ph.D. students who are domestic (U.S. citizens or Permanent Residents) has been in decline over the last several decades from around 70% in the mid-1980’s to under 50% in recent years.  A 2013 CRA-E report shows that a small number of departments have accounted […]

On August 20, 2014, the National Science Foundation (NSF) Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) announced two new $10 million projects for cloud computing testbeds.  These new testbeds will enable academic researchers to develop and experiment with novel cloud architectures and pursue new, architecturally-enabled applications of cloud computing. In the spring of 2013, the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) issued a call for White Papers on mid-scale infrastructure.  An overview of the white papers was presented to the CISE Advisory Committee and used to inform their discussions.  As a result of their recommendations, the Mid-Scale Infrastructure (NSFCloud) program was formed. These two projects, named “Chameleon” and “CloudLab” are part of Phase I of […]

The following is a special contribution to this blog by CCC Executive Council Member Mark Hill and workshop organizer Wade Shen of MIT Lincoln Laboratory. Recently DARPA ISAT organized a workshop on the future of Computer Aided Design tools called “Rethinking CAD”. The purpose of this workshop was to bring together industrial and academic experts from manufacturing and mechanical design fields to understand the limitations of current tools for exploration of design trade spaces for geometry, materials and microstructure in light of recent developments in 3D printing and additive manufacturing.  Here, we summarize the state of today’s technologies and the results of the DARPA ISAT workshop (full slides are available here). […]