(This post has been updated; please scroll down for the latest.) This afternoon, the White House named 96 researchers — including a 2009 Computing Innovation Fellow (CIFellow) — as recipients of the 2012 Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), “the highest honor bestowed by the United States Government on science and engineering professionals in the early stages of their independent research careers.” Established in 1996 and coordinated by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), the awards honor individuals “for their pursuit of innovative research at the frontiers of science and technology and their commitment to community service as demonstrated through scientific leadership, public education, or community outreach.” Among this […]

(This post has been updated; please scroll down for the latest.) For those of you who have been regulars of the CCC Blog since the early days (back in late 2008), thanks for continuing to click on to us. For the rest of you — we’ve seen a surge in traffic in the last year, so many of you are new subscribers/readers — we thought we would take a moment to provide some background about the Computing Community Consortium (CCC). In particular, at the Computing Research Association’s (CRA) biennial Snowbird Conference this week, the CCC is rolling out a new brochure that summarizes its brief history, key goals, and primary […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) has issued a call for participation for an upcoming visioning workshop on spatial computing. Led by Shashi Shekhar (University of Minnesota), the workshop — to be held in Washington, DC, on Sept. 10-11, 2012 — seeks to develop and promote a unified agenda for spatial computing R&D across U.S. agencies, universities, and corporations. From the call for participation (following the link):

The following is a special contribution to this blog by Carlos Guestrin, who will be joining the faculty of the University of Washington computer science and engineering department this fall. Carlos led the organization of the First GraphLab Workshop on Large-scale Machine Learning in San Francisco, CA. The scale and complexity of data on the web continues to grow at a tremendous rate. A recent New York Times article compared Big Data to an economic asset for companies, like currency and gold. But, in order to extract value from 6 billion Flickr images, 900 million Facebook users, 24 million Wikipedia articles, or the 72 hours of video uploaded to YouTube per minute, we need […]

The Association for Computing Machinery’s (ACM) Special Interest Groups on Algorithms and Computation Theory (SIGACT) and Operating Systems (SIGOPS), together with the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science (EATCS), today honored Maurice Herlihy, J. Eliot B. Moss, Nir Shavit, and Dan Touitou with the 2012 Edsger W. Dijkstra Prize, recognizing them for their work on transactional memory in the mid-1990s that transformed parallel computing. The four received the award at the 2012 ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC 2012) in Madeira, Portugal, this morning. According to ACM’s press release (following the link):

At a meeting of the National Science Board (NSB) yesterday, National Science Foundation (NSF) Assistant Director for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Farnam Jahanian announced a new Science Across Virtual Institutes (SAVI) project that brings together teams from the U.S. and Japan to pursue fundamental advances in information technology in support of effective disaster management. The new SAVI — to be called Global Research on Applying Information Technology to Support Effective Disaster Management (GRAIT-DM) — will foster a global research collaboration focused on (following the link):