How does social science and government policy affect technology? That was the main question the Socio-technical Cybersecurity: It’s All About People scientific session attempted to answer at this year’s American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Annual meeting in Washington, DC. The session was moderated by Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Director Ann Drobnis, and CCC Council Member Keith Marzullo (University of Maryland, College Park) was the discussant for the panel, which included participating speakers: Brian LaMacchia (Microsoft Research) highlighted the challenges in cybersecurity in the age of cloud and edge computing in his presentation Cyberspace: Enabling Trustworthy and Autonomous Agency; David Mussington (University of Maryland, College Park) discussed the necessity of […]

On February 19-20, 2019 the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) co-sponsored the Code 8.7: Using Computation Science and AI to End Modern Slavery with the United Nations University Centre for Policy Research, The Alan Turing Institute, Tech Against Trafficking, University of Nottingham Rights Lab, and Arizona State University Global Security Initiative. Code 8.7 brought together computer science researchers and technologists with policy researchers, law enforcement officials, and activists involved in the fight against human trafficking. Code 8.7 was named after Target 8.7 of the Sustainable Development Goals. With Target 8.7, 193 countries agreed to take immediate and effective measures to end forced labor, modern slavery, and human trafficking by 2030, and the worst forms of child […]

The Computing Community Consortium’s (CCC) Industry Working Group has released their Evolving Academia/Industry Relations in Computing Research: Interim Report. In 2015, the CCC sponsored an industry round table that produced the report “The Future of Computing Research: Industry-Academic Collaborations”. Since then, several important trends in computing research have emerged such as the dramatic increase in undergraduate computer science enrollment, the increased availability of information technology, and the rising level of interactions between professors and companies, which has led to the sharing of critical industry resources (such as cloud computing and data). This report considers how these trends impact the interaction between academia and industry in computing fields. The interim report […]

The following blog post is from CCC Chair Mark D. Hill of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Kelvin Droegemeier recently gave his first speech as the Head of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) at the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences (AAAS) 2019 annual meeting in Washington, DC. He is a meteorologist who has done substantial computer modeling and the first non-Physicist to lead OSTP. See the 42-minute video of his talk here. He called for all of us to continue our quest regarding Science’s “Endless Frontier” from Vannevar Bush’s eponymous 1945 report, beginning with a “portfolio analysis” of the US’s tremendous scientific strengths. For those of us […]

Last week I shared my interview with Thermodynamic Computing workshop organizers, Tom Conte (Georgia Tech) and Todd Hylton (UC San Diego) and workshop participant Christof Teuscher in What is Thermodynamic Computing? Part 1. Part 2 of What is Thermodynamic Computing? is now available for streaming or download on Soundcloud (embed below), or you find it on iTunes | Spotify | Stitcher | Google Play. In this episode I interview workshop organizer, Natesh Ganesh, a PhD student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst who is interested in the physical limits to computing, brain inspired hardware, non-equilibrium thermodynamics, and emergence of intelligence in self-organized systems. He was awarded the best paper award at IEEE ICRC’17 for the paper  A Thermodynamic Treatment of Intelligent Systems. I also speak with workshop participant […]

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has announced a webinar on Quantum Leap Challenge Institutes (QLCI). The webinar will take place March 13th from 3:30 PM to 4:30 PM Eastern Standard Time and will provide an overview of the QLCI program. The QLCIs are a part of the Quantum Leap, one of NSF’s 10 Big Ideas. The Quantum Leap focuses on “exploiting quantum mechanics to observe, manipulate, and control the behavior of particles and energy at atomic and subatomic scales, resulting in next-generation technologies for sensing, computing, modeling, and communicating.” NSF will invest $30 million in Quantum Leap through various programs, including the QLCIs, in 2019. Overview Quantum Leap Challenge Institutes (QLCI) […]