With support from the National Science Foundation, the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) today named 20 talented recent Ph.D.s in computer science and allied fields 2011 Computing Innovation Fellows (CIFellows). These exceptionally talented researchers — from 18 different Ph.D.-granting colleges and universities — are beginning one- to two-year postdoctoral positions at 17 academic and industrial research institutions nationwide. They join a total of 107 others who have been supported through the CIFellows Project since 2009, as part of a short-term effort to forestall a permanent loss of research talent due to the financial crisis and subsequent economic downturn. The 2011 CIFellows were competitively selected from 177 applicants spanning 76 Ph.D.-granting colleges and […]

Susan L. Graham — Vice Chair of the CCC Council as well as the Pehong Chen Distinguished Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Emerita and a Professor in the Graduate School at the University of California, Berkeley — will receive this year’s ACM-IEEE Computer Society Ken Kennedy Award for her work on “foundational compilation algorithms and programming tools; research and discipline leadership; and exceptional mentoring“: Susan L. Graham of the University of California Berkeley will receive the ACM-IEEE Computer Society Ken Kennedy Award for contributions to computer programming tools that have significantly advanced software development. Graham’s research covers many areas of software, including human-computing interaction, programming systems, and high-performance computing. Her research collaborations have led […]

(This entry has been updated. Please scroll down for the latest.) Earlier this afternoon, the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) held the first of two webinars to provide an overview of the various Science, Engineering, and Education for Sustainability (SEES) solicitations in FY 2012 — with a particular focus on the details of interest to the CISE research community. Joined by CISE Deputy Assistant Director Cynthia Dion-Schwarz and Computing and Communications Foundations (CCF) Division Director Susanne Hambrusch, Program Director Krishna Kant noted that “sustainability questions present new and exciting opportunities for CISE research that can at the same time have significant societal impact.” Kant and […]

Later this week, five teams from across the country will compete before a blue-ribbon panel of judges — and officials from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) — in the inaugural RoboBowl venture competition. RoboBowl Pittsburgh, as it’s being called (the competition will take place on the campus of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh), is the first in a series of next-generation robotics venture competitions co-sponsored by the Robotics Technology Consortium and Innovation Accelerator “to find and foster startup and early-stage companies seeking to develop products and services that address unmet and underserved market needs in targeted industrial sectors.” The emphasis in Pittsburgh will be on next-generation robotics for healthcare. […]

Editor’s note: As we’ve previously noted in this space, the National Science Foundation (NSF) is soliciting applications for its 2012 East Asia and Pacific Summer Institutes for U.S. Graduate Students (EAPSI). Mike Stilman — an Assistant Professor at Georgia Tech’s School of Interactive Computing and Director of the Humanoid Robotics Lab in the Robotics and Intelligent Machines Center — participated in the 2005 EAPSI program, visiting the Digital Human Research Center (DHRC) in Tokyo, Japan, while a Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon University. Here Mike shares his experiences — and encourages others in computer science (and related fields) to apply. The NSF/JSPS EAPSI program was an essential experience that contributed to the formation of my identity, my world perspective and my career. I […]

We’ve talked about the notion of hypercriticality in computer science in this space before (see here and here), and now Jeannette M. Wing — the former National Science Foundation (NSF) Assistant Director for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) and current Department Head of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University — has written about it with some hard numbers over on the Communications of the ACM Blog: Are computer scientists hypercritical? Are we more critical than scientists and engineers in other disciplines? Bertrand Meyer’s August 22, 2011 The Nastiness Problem in Computer Science blog post partially makes the argument referring to secondhand information from the [NSF]. Here are some NSF numbers to back the claim that we are hypercritical. […]