On January 14, in collaboration with the National Science Foundation and moderated by Axios, the British Embassy is hosting a distinguished panel discussion on the future of transportation, with a focus on driverless vehicles. The panel will be: Jane Lappin, Director of Government Affairs & Public Policy, Toyota Research Institute, and Chair of the Committee on Vehicle-Highway Automation, Transportation Research Board Dr. Missy Cummings, Director of the Humans and Autonomy Laboratory at Duke University & Former U.S. Navy Fighter Pilot Dr. Siobhan Campbell, Head of Central Research Team, Deputy Chief Scientific Adviser, UK Department for Transport Moderator:  Alison Snyder, Managing Editor, Axios On Tuesday (January 14th, 2020), the webcast will […]

The following is an announcement from the National Science Foundation (NSF) Software and Hardware Foundations Program Directors Nina Amla, Anindya Banerjee, and Sol Greenspan announcing an up to $87M (over several years) new funding opportunity called Principles and Practice of Scalable Systems (PPoSS).  The solicitation cites many articles, including the Computing Community Consortium‘s 2012″21st Century Computer Architecture,”  as examples that “have outlined the need for computational systems that enable emerging, large-scale applications without the benefit of Dennard scaling (the “post-Moore’s Law” era).” Dear Colleagues, We would like to wish you a very happy new year! New Program Announcement: The Principles and Practice of Scalable Systems (PPoSS) program is to support a […]

The following blog post is from Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Vice Chair Elizabeth Bradley (University of Colorado Boulder) and CCC Executive Council member Suresh Venkatasubramanian (University of Utah). Algorithmic bias can be insidious, making it all but impossible to pinpoint factors that contribute to discrimination. This is particularly concerning in the context of high-stakes decisions. The new Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) guidelines around the use of algorithms to aid in housing decisions are an example of this. This HUD proposal acknowledges the existence of algorithmic bias but would shift much of the burden of proof to demonstrate discriminatory behavior back onto the plaintiffs, using standards for algorithmic […]

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. Established in 2006 through a cooperative agreement between the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Computing Research Association (CRA), the CCC provides a voice for the national computing research community, and facilitates the development of a bold, multi-themed vision for computing research, and communicates that vision to a wide range of major stakeholders. To fulfill its mission, the CCC needs truly visionary leaders — people with great ideas, sound judgment, and the willingness to work hard to see things to completion. The Council is comprised of 20 diverse researchers from across […]

The following blog was written by Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Chair Mark D. Hill from the University of Wisconsin Madison. Due to technology challenges and potential societal benefits, NSF has provided sustained funding for issues surrounding effective scaling of parallel and distributed computing, including through the Exploiting Parallelism and Scalability (XPS) Program, begun in 2012, and the Scalable Parallelism in the Extreme (SPX) Program, started in 2016. To illuminate directions in this area, NSF commissioned a workshop held in June 2019 as part of the Federated Computing Research Conference and led by Michael Carbin of MIT and Scott D. Stoller of Stony Brook University. The workshop report was recently issued. […]

The following is a guest blog from Sarita V. Adve from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Ratislav Bodik and Luis Ceze from the University of Washington, co-organizers of the DARPA ISAT I-USHER study. We are pleased to share the results of a DARPA ISAT study, I-USHER: Interfaces to Unlock the Specialized HardwarE Revolution, arguing for new hardware/software interfaces to enable the revolution promised by hardware specialization. Advances in hardware specialization are expected to deliver several orders of magnitude improvements in performance, cost, and energy efficiency over the next decade, bringing the promise of revolutionizing applications in datacenters to invisible computing.  To harness the power of this new class […]