Last year the IEEE announced the creation of the IEEE Frances E Allen medal, recognizing the contributions of Frances “Fran” E. Allen as an American computer scientist and pioneer in the field of optimizing compilers. Allen spent her entire career at IBM, beginning in 1957 by teaching new employees the fundamentals of Fortran and continuing until her retirement in 2002. From 1980 to 1995, Allen led IBM’s work in the developing parallel computing area, and helped to develop software for the IBM Blue Gene project. Among her many awards, Allen was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1987, she became the first female IBM Fellow in 1989, and in 2006 became […]

Yesterday, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy’s National Artificial Intelligence (AI) Initiative Office launched the new AI.gov website.  This website is the home of the National AI Initiative Act of 2020 and as stated in the press release “the connection point to ongoing activities to advance U.S. leadership in AI from policy documents and strategies, to applications of AI, to the latest news and updates from the agencies and federal advisory boards helping shape the activities of the National AI Initiative.”  National AI Initiative Act of 2020 became law on January 1, 2021, providing for a coordinated program across the entire Federal government to accelerate AI research […]

The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) has elected 120 new members- including a record number of women- and 30 foreign members. Five computing researchers are among those elected this year. They include Gilles Brassard (Université de Montréal), Michael Kearns (University of Pennsylvania), Anna Karlin (University of Washington), Yann LeCun (New York University), and Linda Petzold (University of California, Santa Barbara). Michael Kearns has participated in many Computing Community Consortium (CCC) workshops including Theoretical Foundations for Social Computing in 2015 and Fair Representations and Fair Interactive Learning in 2018. Anna Karlin is a former CRA-Widening Participation (CRA-EP) Board Member. She has been active in several CRA-WP activities including Grad Cohort, Virtual […]

The National Science Foundation (NSF) Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) is hosting a webinar on the Broadening Participation in Computing (BPC) program solicitation (NSF 21-571) on May 4, 2021 starting at 2:00 pm Eastern Time.  The webinar will take place via Zoom. It will include a briefing on the 2021 BPC program and key solicitation requirements, followed by a question-and-answer session. Prior to the webinar, you can submit questions to cise-bpc@nsf.gov.  Click here to register in advance for this webinar. After registering, a confirmation email will be sent containing information about how to join the webinar. Participants will be able to join in listen-only mode and […]

Contributions to this post were provided by Elizabeth Bradley (University of Colorado Boulder), Madhav Marathe (University of Virginia), Melanie Moses (The University of New Mexico), William D. Gropp (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign), and Daniel Lopresti (Lehigh University).  We are pleased to announce the second addendum to the Computing Research Association (CRA) and Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Pandemic Informatics: Preparation, Robustness, and Resilience quadrennial paper on variants of concern (VOC).    A year ago, few experts correctly predicted the toll the pandemic has now taken, nor the extraordinarily rapid development and administration of effective vaccines. Scientists have dramatically increased understanding of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, treatment, and vaccines. Yet, where the pandemic will […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is pleased to announce the release of a new white paper,  A National Discovery Cloud: Preparing the US for Global Competitiveness in the New Era of 21st Century Digital Transformation, led by Ian Foster with significant support from Daniel Lopresti, Bill Gropp, Mark D. Hill, and Katie Schuman. The three “pillars,” as the paper calls them, of this new computation fabric include the “emergence of public cloud utilities as a new computing platform; the ability to extract information from enormous quantities of data via machine learning; and the emergence of computational simulation as a research method on par with experimental science.”  In order for the […]