This is a guest blog post by Greg Hager, Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Past Chair and Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University, with contributions from Eric Horvitz the Technical Fellow & Managing Director at Microsoft Research and a past president of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). In a recent blog post, we summarized the report of an academic/industry roundtable, which, among other recommendations, advocated for mechanisms to support long-term, strategic, and sustained conversation between academics and industry representatives. Yesterday, one such mechanism came into being with the announcement of the Partnership on AI by a consortium consisting of Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Facebook, and IBM. From the press release: The objective of […]

To kick off the start of Smart Cities Week, the White House has announced that it is expanding its Smart Cities initiative, by adding over $80 million dollars in new federal investments and doubling the number of participating communities (to over 70 in total). The Community Community Consortium (CCC) held a Smart Cities panel and discussion at the Computing Research Symposium: Addressing National Priorities and Societal Needs. You can see the full discussion here. Some highlights from the White House Fact Sheet are below: Today, to kick off Smart Cities Week, the Administration is expanding this initiative, with over $80 million in new Federal investments and a doubling of the number of […]

The Computing Community Consortium convened a round-table of industry and academic participants in July 2015 to better understand the landscape of industry-academic interaction, and to discuss possible actions that might be taken to enhance those interactions. This discussion was preceded by a survey sent to academics and industry representatives in Spring of 2015. This survey was designed to provide some current information about the perceptions of the value of academic/industry interaction as well as trends and barriers. The resulting report, The Future of Computing Research: Industry-Academic Collaborations, touches on topics that were discussed during the round-table as well as in the survey. From the report: In reflecting on the results […]

The following is a guest blog post by Tracy Kimbrel, Program Director, Computing and Communication Foundations, Computer and Information Science and Engineering, National Science Foundation.  The National Science Foundation’s Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) recently revised and released the Algorithms in the Field (AitF) program solicitation. AitF aims to promote collaboration between theory researchers and those in more applied areas. Bridging the gap between theory and practice in the design, analysis, implementation, and evaluation of algorithms can lead to new fields as well as broader cutting-edge applications. The premise is that by working jointly “in the field,” researchers from these different communities will continually inform each other, […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) will be sponsoring a visioning activity on Sociotechnical Cybersecurity. As a part of this effort, the workshop organizing committee has released a call for white papers in order to both assist us in organizing the workshop and in selecting attendees. Authors of informative and well-crafted white papers may be invited to the Sociotechnical Cybersecurity workshop. Read the full call for proposals below: Sociotechnical Cybersecurity Workshop Call For White Papers We are holding two CCC-sponsored workshops, on December 12th-13th and in the first half of 2017, with the goal of developing a small set of grand challenges to set research directions for the discipline of cybersecurity, with the understanding that […]

The following is a guest blog post from Aaron Dubrow, Public Affairs Specialist for the Office of Legislative and Public Affairs (OLPA) at the National Science Foundation (NSF), and Gera Jochum, Communications Specialist for the Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Directorate at the NSF. Today, the White House hosted its first Summit on Computer Science for All to celebrate progress and announce new commitments for the initiative. As the lead Federal agency responsible for building the research knowledge base for Computer Science (CS) education, the National Science Foundation (NSF) announced more than $25 million in awards since the initiative was launched just seven months ago. These new awards accelerate NSF’s ongoing efforts […]