Contributions to this post were made by Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council Member Kevin Fu, Associate Professor at the University of Michigan. Kevin also co-founded Virta Labs, a healthcare cybersecurity company. A growing number of medical devices are designed to be networked to facilitate patient care. However, as we have seen, networked medical devices and hospital records incorporate software that make them vulnerable to cybersecurity threats. Proactively addressing cybersecurity risks in hospitals reduces the patient safety impact and the overall risk to public health. On January 22, 2016, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) released a draft document to inform industry and FDA staff on recommendations for managing postmarket cybersecurity vulnerabilities for marketed medical devices. This document clarifies […]

The National Cancer Institute (NCI), part of the National Institutes of Health has launched an online platform to enable the research community and the public to submit ideas on the National Cancer Moonshot efforts. The goal of the Moonshot Initiative is to accelerate progress in the fight against cancer by swiftly advancing knowledge from cutting-edge basic research to new prevention and treatment strategies for patients, said NCI Acting Director Douglas Lowy, M.D. The community involvement that the initiative garners will allow us to consider novel, creative ideas that might not otherwise have come to NCI’s attention. Submissions will be considered by the Blue Ribbon Panel (BRP) of scientific experts and […]

On June 6, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) will host the 2016 Video Analytics in Public Safety (VAPS) Workshop, a satellite workshop of the Public Safety Communications Research (PSCR) Broadband Stakeholder Meeting on June 7-9.  The goal of the VAPS workshop will be to create an environment where technical stakeholders of all types can exchange knowledge, practices, needs, challenges, issues, and ideas to jointly identify the critical R&D, resources, standards, and collaboration vehicles and infrastructure to support the creation of a robust public safety video analytics R&D ecosystem. The VAPS workshop is intended to inform national strategy for video analytics R&D and to lay the foundation for the […]

The next WATCH talk, called Crypto Wars: Plus ça Change, Plus c’est la Même Chose is Thursday, April 21, 2016 from Noon-1pm EDT. The presenter will be Susan Landau, professor of Cybersecurity Policy in the Department of Social Science and Policy Studies at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Landau works at the intersection of cybersecurity, national security, law, and policy. During the Crypto Wars of the 1990s, her insights on how government encryption policy skewed civil society and business needs for security helped win the argument for a relaxation of cryptographic export controls. Beginning in the early 2000s, Landau was an early voice in the argument that law-enforcement requirements for embedding surveillance within […]

The National Science Foundation (NSF) Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) is pleased to announce a distinguished lecture on Wednesday, April 20, 2016 at 2:00pm EDT by Dr. Daniela Rus titled Pervasive Robots. Daniela Rus is a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at MIT. She is also a Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council Member. Rus’s research interests are in robotics, mobile computing, and data science. Rus is a Class of 2002 MacArthur Fellow, a fellow of ACM, AAAI and IEEE, and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. She earned her PhD in Computer […]

Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council Member Jennifer Rexford has been named the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) 2016-2017 Athena Lecturer. Each year, the Athena Lecturer award celebrates women researchers who have made fundamental contributions to computer science. Rexford is the Gordon Y. S. Wu Professor in Engineering in the Department of Computer Science at Princeton University. She has been cited for innovations that improved the efficiency of the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) in routing Internet traffic, for laying the groundwork for software-defined networks (SDNs) and for contributions in measuring and engineering IP networks. These contributions greatly enhanced the stability and flow of Internet transmissions, and make data networks easier to design, understand and manage. […]