The President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) today unanimously approved a draft report reviewing the 14-agency, $4 billion Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) program. The 14-person working group that assisted with the biannual review, completed this summer, was co-chaired by Ed Lazowska (full disclosure: Ed is Chair of the CCC Council) and PCAST member David Shaw. In their summary of the major findings during a public session of PCAST in Washington, DC, this morning, Ed and David noted how networking and information technology (NIT) has greatly enhanced our nation’s economic competitiveness, all the while significantly accelerating the pace of discovery in all fields. They […]

“Today is a very exciting day for GENI,” Chip Elliott, Director of the GENI Project Office (GPO), said as he kicked off the 9th GENI Engineering Conference this morning in Washington, DC. Before a hotel ballroom packed with research faculty, students, and Federal agency representatives, the nation’s best young researchers in networking and distributed systems showed off the first-ever set of research experiments on GENI, illustrating the future of network science and engineering — and what it means for our society at large. The set of live demos — with participants from around the country — were simply incredible. As background, the Global Environment for Network Innovation (GENI) Project was […]

Congratulations to Paul Debevec — Research Associate Professor & Associate Director of Graphics Research at the University of Southern California’s Institute for Creative Technologies — who won an Academy Award earlier this year for his breakthrough lighting technology work! The Academy of Motion Pictures honored Paul with a Scientific and Engineering Academy Award for “the design and engineering of the Light Stage capture devices and the image-based facial rendering system developed for character relighting in motion pictures.” Paul shared the honor with colleagues Tim Hawkins of LightStage, LLC, John Monos of Sony Pictures Imageworks, and Mark Sagar of WETA Digital. The light stage technology Paul and his team developed has […]

The CCC is interested in stimulating the development of new research visions and challenges. To do so, the CCC has been collaborating with conferences in computer science and sponsoring vision (sometimes called “crazy ideas”) sessions with travel awards for the most exciting submissions. Following the success at PLDI’s “Fun Ideas and Thoughts” session (see a prior blog entry), the CCC sponsored the Research Vision session at the 9th Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI), held Oct 4-6, 2010, in Vancouver. In collaboration with the OSDI committee, the CCC is happy to announce the winners of the Research Vision session at OSDI: 1. SIGOPS to SIGARCH: “Now it’s our […]

Our colleagues at ACM today announced a landmark report that presents, for the first time, a state-by-state breakdown of current K-12 standards for computer science education, including specific high school graduation requirements: http://www.acm.org/runningonempty. At the same time, a new non-partisan coalition of associations, corporations, scientific societies, and other non-profits was unveiled. Computing in the Core, as it’s called, comprises CRA, NCWIT, the Anita Borg Institute for Women & Technology, the Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA), Microsoft, Google, and SAS. It strives to elevate computer science education to a core academic subject in K-12 education, giving young people the college- and career-readiness skills necessary in a technology-focused society. CinC’s new website […]

Farnam Jahanian, Professor and Chair of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Michigan, today was named the next Assistant Director for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) at NSF, effective February 1, 2011. Jahanian will assume the position that Jeannette Wing successfully held for three years before returning to CMU in early July. For Jahanian’s complete bio, see http://www.eecs.umich.edu/~farnam/bio.htm. The official NSF announcement is available here.