The following is a special contribution to this blog by CCC Executive Council Member Mark D. Hill of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. A key driver behind the amazing progress in computer performance and computer cost-performance has been Moore’s Law (doubling transistors per chip every two years) and Dennard Scaling (doing so at roughly constant power). Many have been warning that there are challenges with both and that new action is need to use transistors more efficiently. See for example the National Academies 2011 report “The Future of Computing Performance: Game Over or Next Level?” and the Computer Community Consortium 2012 white paper “21st Century Computer Architecture”. Intel has long been a contrarian […]

The National Science Foundation (NSF) Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) is pleased to announce a distinguished lecture on Thursday, March 31, 2016 at 2:00pm EST by Dr. Andrew Moore titled Google-tech to CMU-SCS-tech: Strategy around Data, Augmented Humans and Autonomy. Andrew W. Moore PhD, a distinguished computer scientist with expertise in machine learning and robotics, became dean of the Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science in August 2014. He had previously served as a professor of computer science and robotics before taking a leave of absence to become founding director of Google’s Pittsburgh engineering office in 2006. Moore’s research interests broadly encompass the field of “big data”–applying statistical methods and mathematical formulas to massive quantities […]

Contributions to this post were made by Elizabeth Mynatt, CCC Vice Chair and Executive Director of the Institute for People and Technology at Georgia Tech. Dr. Mynatt was a member of the President’s Council of Advisors for Science and Technology (PCAST) working group on aging and technology and led the Computing Community Consortium’s (CCC) Aging in Place workshop. Recently, the New York Times published an article on A Push for Less Expensive Hearing Aids. The article highlighted the findings in a recent PCAST report on aging and technology. The report stated that almost two-thirds of Americans over the age of 70 have some kind of hearing loss, however many of them […]

The following Great Innovative Idea is from David H. Ackley from the University of New Mexico. His Indefinite Scalability for Living Computation paper was one of the winners at the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) sponsored Blue Sky Ideas Track Competition at the 30th Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-16), February 12-17, 2016 in Phoenix, Arizona. The Innovative Idea Traditional digital computers employ hardware determinism, meaning that running a program twice on the same inputs is guaranteed to produce the same outputs. Determinism greatly simplifies programming the machine, but ultimately limits its size—and encourages the development of software that is highly efficient, but also extremely fragile, and all but impossible to keep secure. The blue sky idea is […]

The next WATCH talk, called The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work is Thursday, March 24, 2016 from Noon-1pm EDT. The presenter will be Phillip Rogaway, professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of California, Davis. Rogaway studied cryptography at MIT (1991), then worked as a security architect for IBM before joining the faculty at the University of California, Davis in 1994. Co-inventor of “practice-oriented provable security,” Rogaway’s work seeks to meld cryptographic theory and cryptographic practice in a mutually beneficial way. Abstract: Cryptography rearranges power: it configures who can do what, from what. This makes cryptography an inherently political tool, and it confers on the field an intrinsically moral dimension. […]

The following is a guest blog post by Beth Mynatt, Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Vice Chair and professor of Interactive Computing and the executive director of Georgia Tech‘s Institute for People and Technology (IPaT).  The Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) Pioneers Project draws attention to HCI trail-blazers by describing their backgrounds and contributions. Ben Shneiderman, Professor of Computer Science at the University of Maryland, started the personal photo journal as a tribute to these individuals and as a celebration of their contributions to HCI. He hopes to make the pioneer’s projects more visible to a wider audience by featuring them on the website. Ben always had his camera with him at major conferences and […]