The time is now for computer science education! With the shifting economy, educators are increasingly recognizing computer science as a new basic requirement. In his final State of the Union address, President Barack Obama said that “helping students learn to write computer code” is among his goals for the year ahead. Jim Kurose, the Assistant Director of the National Science Foundation (NSF) for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) released a letter to the community acknowledging the excitement in the community but also noting to “please stay tuned as the Administration announces new steps in the coming weeks to support efforts to expand access to computer science education across the Nation.” White House Office of Science Technology Policy U.S. Chief Technology […]

This post was contributed by Shashi Shekhar, Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council member and Distinguished University Professor at the University of Minnesota.  National Science Foundation (NSF) in partnership with U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA)/National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) recently issued the awaited INFEWS solicitation 16-524 with a budget of $50M. Proposals are due in late March, 2016. It’s estimated number of awards is between 22 and 40 across four tracks, namely, FEW system modeling, Visualization and Decision Support, Innovative Systems Solutions and Education/Workforce Development. Computing topics show up in all tracks and quite frequently in the second track. Synopsis: Humanity is reliant upon the physical resources and natural systems of the Earth […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Computing in the Physical World Task Force has just released another community whitepaper on Smart Communities Internet of Things.  The Task Force, led by CCC Council Member Ben Zorn from Microsoft Research and Shwetak Patel from University of Washington, is looking at core research challenges that the Internet of Things (IoT) presents. This whitepaper, led by Klara Nahnahrstedt from the University of Illinois at Urbana – Champaign, highlights the benefits and challenges of cyber-technologies within “Smart Cities”, especially the IoT for smart communities, which means considering the benefits and challenges of IoT cyber-technologies on joint smart cities physical infrastructures and their human stakeholders. Their recommendations are summarized below: There is a major […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is charged with catalyzing and empowering the U.S. computing research community to articulate and advance major research directions for the field. To do so, the CCC needs truly visionary leaders — people with great ideas, sound judgment, and the willingness to work hard to see things to completion. Please help the computing community by nominating such people for the Council. Established in 2006 through a cooperative agreement between the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Computing Research Association (CRA) — representing over 220 North American academic departments, industrial research labs, and professional societies with computing research interests, the CCC provides a voice for the national computing […]

Contributions to this post were made by Gregory Hager, Chair of the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) and Professor of Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University and Martin Weiner, AAAS Science & Technology Policy Fellow in the Directorate for Computer & Information Science & Engineering Directorate at NSF.  Recently, the organizers of the CCC workshop on Research Interfaces between Brain Science and Computer Science were invited to present their workshop report at the National Science Foundation (NSF). Jack Gallant (UC Berkeley), Polina Golland (MIT) and Greg Hager (CCC Chair, JHU) gave the presentation and led surrounding discussions. The Research Interfaces between Brain Science and Computer Science workshop was held December 2014 in […]

Stanford University, in conjunction with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Research Councils of the United Kingdom (RCUK) with support from the National Science Foundation (NSF), is hosting a Transatlantic Data Science Workshop. This two-day workshop will be held on March 1-2, 2016 at the NIH campus in Bethesda, MD. The objectives of this workshop are: To facilitate the development of novel computational approaches to health; To guide computer scientists, data scientists, statisticians, computational scientists, and mathematicians in discovering and accessing US and UK health datasets; and To support early stage researchers in establishing interdisciplinary, international collaborations. The first day of the workshop will be devoted to exploring […]