July 31, 2014 marks Farnam Jahanian’s final day as Assistant Director for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) at the National Science Foundation (NSF). In this position, which he has held since February 1, 2011, Farnam has been a indefatigable champion for the computer science research community.  He led the launch of three Presidential Initiatives: the National Robotics Initiative, the Big Data Research and Development Initiative, and US Ignite.  He led the Directorate through the creation of 25 new solicitations, many of which were cross-directorate, and he spearheaded the expansion of interagency and international collaborations: Smart and Connected Health with NIH; Collaborative Research in Computational Neuroscience with NIH, Israel, France and […]

The biennial CRA Conference at Snowbird took place last week for Chairs, Department Heads, and Lab Directors from across North America.  Nearly 300 people gathered to participate in sessions ranging in topics from issues in government surveillance using the Internet to creating a diverse Computer Science research community.  The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) led a variety of sessions throughout the conference.  Excitement was high for the programs being put on by the CCC: Computing Visions 2025: The Visions 2025 initiative was created to inspire the computing community to envision future trends and opportunities in computing research. Where is the computing field going over the next 10-15 years? What are potential […]

Last month, 24 teams from around the country convened in Washington, D.C. to showcase their work in Cyber-Physical Systems at the Smart America Expo.  The demonstrations showcased ways that the these projects and others in the realm of the Internet of Things can improve transportation, emergency services, health care, security, energy conservation, manufacturing and more. The National Science Foundation (NSF) has been a strong supporter of these projects, through the Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) program, investing more than $200 million over the last five years.  For more information and videos about some of the NSF-funded projects that were a part of the Smart America showcase, see this Huffington Post article titled “Dispatches […]

Below is a Letter from Dr. Farnam Jahanian, Assistant Director at the National Science Foundation (NSF) for the Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Directorate. Dear CISE Community, I am delighted to announce that Dr. Keith Marzullo has been reappointed to the position of the Director of the Division of Computer and Network Systems (CNS) at NSF, effective July 2014. Dr. Marzullo has been an exemplary member of the CISE senior management team for the past several years, and we are thrilled that he will continue in his current position. Dr. Marzullo has brought significant broad scientific expertise to CISE and CNS research areas and will continue to provide strong leadership in cybersecurity, networking and distributed systems, cyber physical systems, and other areas in […]

The following is a special contribution to this blog by by CCC Executive Council Member Mark D. Hill of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Background: Senior computer scientists remember memory “capabilities” as an abstraction for controlling access to objects in machines such as Burroughs B5000 and IBM System/38. In the late 20th century, capabilities lost out to virtual memory with a linear address and per-page protection, as these systems were faster and coarse-grain protection was deemed sufficient. In our 21st century, security is much more important and memory attacks often cross object boundaries (e.g., buffer overflow attacks). Vision:  Wouldn’t it be interesting if one could reincarnate capabilities for better memory security […]

The 15th Annual Microsoft Research Faculty Summit is taking place July 14-15, 2014 in Redmond, WA.  There is an exciting program planned with topics including computing devices and the Internet of Things, hardware-software co-design, data visualization, crowdsourcing applications, machine learning, and the algorithms that underlie emerging fields, such as computational neuroscience.  If you’re not going to be in Redmond, you can still be a part of the action, as the event will be live streamed for all to see. Last year’s Research Faculty Summit was a huge success, you can read about in this blog post by Ed Lazowska.  This year looks to be just as promising!