The following blog was written by CCC Vice Chair Mark D. Hill from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. As previously reported in the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Blog, two major hardware security design flaws—dubbed Meltdown and Spectre—were broadly revealed to the public in early January 2018. These flaws are described in detail by the discoverers in research papers on Meltdown and Spectre, as well as Google blog posts here and here. Understanding these sources, however, requires considerable expertise and effort. For this reason, I have prepared a slide deck (animated PPTX or PDF) to give the general computer science audience the gist of these security flaws and their implications. My goal […]

The mission of Computing Research Association’s (CRA) Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is to catalyze the computing research community and enable the pursuit of innovative, high-impact research. CCC conducts activities that strengthen the research community, articulate compelling research visions and align those visions with pressing national and global challenges. CCC communicates the importance of those visions to policymakers, government and industry stakeholders, the public, and the research community itself. In accordance with the mission, CCC is issuing a new call for proposals for workshops that will catalyze and enable innovative research at the frontiers of computing. From the solicitation:  A well-formulated proposal should do the following: Describe the visioning topic area and its current state of development within the field, […]

The National Academy of Engineering (NAE) has elected 83 new members and 16 foreign members. This brings the total U.S. membership to 2,293 and the number of foreign members to 262. Many of the newly elected members work in fields related to computer science. Here are a few of them: Oussama Khatib, director of the Stanford Robotics Lab, and professor, department of computer science, Stanford University, Stanford, Calif. For contributions to the understanding, analysis, control, and design of robotic systems operating in complex, unstructured, and dynamic environments. Jayadev Misra, Schlumberger Centennial Chair Emeritus in Computer Science and University Distinguished Teaching Professor Emeritus, University of Texas, Austin. For contributions to the theory and practice of software […]

National Academy of Sciences’ Sackler Colloquium on Creativity and Collaboration: Revisiting Cybernetic Serendipity will be in Washington, DC at the National Academy of Sciences (2101 Constitution Avenue, NW Washington, District of Columbia 20418) on March 13-14, 2018. Our ambition is to redirect the history of ideas, restoring the Leonardo-like close linkage between art/design and science/engineering. We believe that internet-enabled collaborations can make more people more creative more of the time. 50 years ago in an era of political turmoil, the artistic response was captured in a famed exhibit on Cybernetic Serendipity that celebrated how individual artists could creatively transform computers into art machines. The rock star artists entranced 40,000 viewers with never-before seen images, […]

The next WATCH talk, called Server-Side Verification of Client Behavior, from Michael Reiter at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is Thursday, February 15th, from 12PM -1PM. Michael Reiter is the Lawrence M. Slifkin Distinguished Professor in the Department of Computer Science at UNC Chapel Hill. His research interests include all areas of computer and communications security, distributed computing, and networking. His professional responsibilities during his career so far have included Director of Secure Systems Research at Bell Labs; founding Technical Director of CyLab at Carnegie Mellon University; program chair for the flagship computer security conferences of the IEEE, the ACM, and the Internet Society; and Editor-in-Chief of ACM Transactions on Information and System Security, among others. Dr. […]

The following Great Innovative Idea is from Laura Major, the Vice President of Engineering at CyPhy Works. Major was one of the Blue Sky Award winners at the International Symposium on Robotics Research (ISRR 17) in Puerto Varas, Chile for her paper, Autonomous Agents in the Wild: Human Interaction Challenges.  The Idea Autonomy is moving into commercial applications, where it is being encountered by untrained, unfamiliar consumers. These individuals, with little exposure to autonomy or its principles, will be using advanced automation to perform safety-critical tasks such as driving their cars or flying video-capture drones. While advanced automation has been applied in industrial applications for decades, with experts using it to monitor and control highly […]