The following is a letter to the community from Sushil K. Prasad in the Directorate for Computer & Information Science & Engineering (CISE) Division of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure (ACI) at the National Science Foundation (NSF). Dear Colleagues, I am pleased to inform you of ACI’s emerging CAREER program for junior faculty members in the wider computational science and engineering disciplines (NSF 15-555).  Please see NSF’s Dear Colleague Letter about this program.  CAREER is the most prestigious NSF award supporting the junior faculty as a teacher-scholar with a minimum award of $400K over five years.  Top 20 of these awardees are nominated each year for the Presidential Early Career Awards.  The proposals are due on July 21, 2015. […]

The following is a guest blog post by Dr. Robin Murphy, Raytheon Professor of Computer Science and Engineering and Faculty Fellow for Innovation in High-Impact Learning Experiences at Texas A&M University.  The Nepal earthquake illustrates the need for critical real-time computing and information systems, dubbed “CRICIS computing” by a 2012 NSF/CCC visioning workshop. The findings from the CRICIS report still hold: that disasters require “fundamental new research in socio-technical systems that enable decision-making for
extreme scales under extreme conditions. This research cuts across physical and engineered artifacts, information technology, and human-computer collaboration. It is an example of the general shift in science and industry from physical devices and computational packages to socio-technical information systems […]

The Computing Research Association (CRA), in consultation with the National Science Foundation (NSF), has appointed five new members to the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council: Cynthia Dwork, Microsoft Research Kevin Fu, University of Michigan Daniel P. Lopresti, Lehigh University Shwetak Patel, University of Washington Katherine Yelick, University of California at Berkeley Beginning July 1, the new members will each serve three-year terms. The CCC Council is comprised of 20 members who have expertise in diverse areas of computing. They are instrumental in leading CCC’s visioning programs, which help create and enable visions for future computing research. Members serve staggered three-year terms that rotate every July. The CCC and CRA thank […]

The following Great Innovative Idea is from Dr. Xiaojin (Jerry) Zhu, Associate Professor of Computer Science at University of Wisconsin-Madison. Zhu’s paper Machine Teaching: an Inverse Problem to Machine Learning and an Approach Toward Optimal Education won the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) sponsored Blue Sky Ideas Conference Track series at the 29th Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-15), January 25-30, 2015 in Austin, Texas. The Innovative Idea Machine teaching is machine learning turned upside down: it is about finding the optimal (e.g. the smallest) training set.  For example, consider a “student” who runs the Support Vector Machine learning algorithm.  Imagine a teacher who wants to teach the student a specific target hyperplane in some […]

The following is a blog post by Ran Libeskind-Hadas, R. Michael Shanahan Professor and Computer Science Department Chair at Harvey Mudd College and Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council Member, that was recently posted in the Huffington Post.  Here are three good reasons why every college student should take an introductory computer science course. First, computing has become an inextricable part of our lives. Understanding how computers and software work, what they can and can’t do, and their impact on society is, therefore, an important part of a modern liberal arts education. Second, computing is a creative endeavor at the crossroads of engineering, mathematics, psychology, and the arts. A well-conceived computer science course can integrate problem solving, […]

The National Academy of Sciences recently announced the election of 84 new members and 21 foreign associates from 15 countries in recognition of their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research. Those elected bring the total number of active members to 2,250 and the total number of foreign associates to 452. The list includes these five computer scientists: Manindra Agrawal, the N. Rama Rao Chair Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur, India. His research is in cryptography, complex analysis and combinatorics. Robert E. Kahn, the President and CEO of the Corporation for National Research Initiatives in Reston, Va. Recently he has been developing the […]