The White House has kicked off the first ever Smart Cities Week (September 15-17, 2015) in Washington, DC, announcing new steps in support of a new National Smart Cities Initiative. The National Smart Cities Initiative will invest over $160 million in federal research and leverage more than 25 new technology collaborations to help local communities tackle key challenges such as reducing traffic congestion, fighting crime, fostering economic growth, managing the effects of a changing climate, and improving the delivery of city services. The Administration’s Smart Cities Initiative will begin with a focus on three key strategies creating test beds for “Internet of Things” applications and developing new multi-sector collaborative models, collaborating with the […]

The following is a special contribution to this blog by CCC Executive Council Member Mark D. Hill of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Full disclosure: He had the pleasure of working with one of the authors of the discussed paper—Sarita Adve—on her 1993 Ph.D. Great conundrums include: * Will I drink coffee or tea? * Shall I have cake or ice cream? * Should I use a cache or scratchpad? While most readers will not face the last choice, it is important for saving time and energy in the devices we love by keeping frequently-used information close at hand. Caches are the workhorse of modern computers, feeding the processor with data […]

National Science Foundation (NSF) Assistant Director for the Directorate of Computer & Information Science & Engineering (CISE) James Kurose has issued the following letter to the community describing the Division Director position available: Dear Colleagues, NSF is pleased to announce the search for a Division Director for the Division of Computing and Network Systems (CNS) in the Directorate for Computer & Information Science & Engineering (CISE).  The official announcement for this position can be found on USAJOBS at https://www.usajobs.gov/GetJob/ViewDetails/414827000. CNS, one of four divisions in CISE, supports research and education activities on new computing and networking systems and technologies, while ensuring their security and privacy, and on new ways to make use of […]

Texas A&M University‘s Raytheon Professor of Computer Science and Engineering and former Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council Member, Robin Murphy recently gave a TED talk on Disaster Robots. Robots don’t replace people or dogs…They do things new. They assist the responders, the experts, in new and innovative ways. Robin Murphy, explains how if you can reduce the initial emergency response by one day, you can reduce the overall recovery by 1000 days. If the initial responders can get in, save lives… that means the other groups can get in to restore the water, the roads, the electricity, which means then the construction people, the insurance agents, all of them can get in to rebuild […]

  The following Great Innovative Idea is from Sergey Levine, Chelsea Finn, Trevor Darrell, and Pieter Abbeel in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences (EECS) Department at the University of California Berkeley. Their End-to-End Training of Deep Visuomotor Policies paper was one of the winners at the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) sponsored Blue Sky Ideas Track Competition at the AAAI-RSS Special Workshop on the 50th Anniversary of Shakey: The Role of AI to Harmonize Robots and Humans in Rome, Italy. It was a half day workshop on July 16th during the Robotics Science and Systems (RSS) 2015 Conference. The Innovative Idea Techniques like reinforcement learning and optimal control offer the promise of automating robotic decision making by using […]

The following is a special contribution to this blog by CCC Executive Council Member Mark D. Hill of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Internet-based services that we have all come to love (e.g., search, email, social networks, video/photo sharing) are all powered by large back-end data centers, designed and managed as large warehouse-scale computers. Emerging cloud computing workloads also use such warehouse-scale computers, making it even more important to understand and optimize this class of computer systems. But until now, such warehouse-scale computers have (true to their name!) been big black boxes, with very little insight about detailed performance characteristics of deployments at scale: What is the nature of workloads that run […]