The following is a guest post from CCC Council Member Kevin Fu, the Associate Professor of EECS at the University of Michigan and Chief Scientist of Virta Labs, Inc. Last month, the White House quietly convened a group of medical device security stakeholders and domain experts to discuss the cybersecurity challenges faced by healthcare delivery organizations and medical device manufacturers. There were actually multiple meetings. Here I summarize just one that I attended in my role as a professor leading the Archimedes Center for Medical Device Security at the University of Michigan, and in my role as a member of the Computing Research Association’s Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council. Convened by the […]

The following Great Innovative Idea is from Yao-Yi Chiang from the University of Southern California. His Querying Historical Maps as a Unified, Structured, and Linked Spatiotemporal Source paper was the first place winner at the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) sponsored Blue Sky Ideas Track Competition at the ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems 2015 (SIGSPATIAL 2015) in Seattle, Washington. The Innovative Idea Historical maps hold a great deal of detailed geographic information at various times in the past but finding relevant maps is difficult and the map content are not machine-readable. Using computer algorithms and geospatial technology applications, I am building the techniques to unlock historical information from maps. I envision a […]

This weekend the president unveiled a historic plan which will revolutionize the way students are taught in schools, by giving them a chance to learn computer science (CS). With the shifting economy, policy makers, business leaders, and educators are finally recognizing that CS is a basic skill necessary for economic opportunity and social mobility. This is a change that our community has recognized for many years. As we noted a few weeks ago with the release of our Computing Education Whitepaper, President Obama said in his final State of the Union Address, that “helping students learn to write computer code” was among his goals for the year ahead. A growing […]

Graduate students and postdoctoral scholars from institutions in Canada, Europe, Japan and the United States are invited to apply for the seventh International Summer School on HPC Challenges in Computational Sciences, to be held June 26 to July 1, 2016, in Ljubljana, Slovenia. Applications are due Feb. 15. The summer school is sponsored by the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) with funds from the U.S. National Science Foundation, Compute/Calcul Canada, the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE) and the RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science (RIKEN AICS). Leading American, European and Japanese computational scientists and HPC technologists will offer instruction on a variety of topics, including: HPC challenges by […]

The AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellows at the National Science Foundation (NSF) have organized another talk in their Data Science Seminar Series from Michael I. Jordan on Computational Thinking, Inferential Thinking and Data Science. The talk will be on Thursday, January 28 from 11:00-12:00PM at NSF Stafford I, Room 110.  Michael I. Jordan is the Pehong Chen Distinguished Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the Department of Statistics at the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests bridge the computational, statistical, cognitive and biological sciences, and have focused in recent years on Bayesian nonparametric analysis, probabilistic graphical models, spectral methods, kernel machines and applications to problems in […]

Well, that was a whopper! The Washington, DC area received its first blizzard in many years this past weekend. For a city that normally only receives 15.4 inches of snow spread out over an entire season, the two plus feet of snow has been overwhelming for the city. DC is not equipped to handle this amount of snow. But, we were warned. And, for the most part, the weather forecasters were right on target. All thanks to amazing computer models that predicted the storms path and total accumulation with stellar accuracy 8 days before the storm hit the region. This was highlighted by the Washington Post: This forecast success would […]