A post this week in AmStatNews, the membership magazine of the American Statistical Association, is a ringing endorsement of CCC’s activities: “On the topic of Big Data and the statistical science community’s contention that the federal policymakers should be engaging statisticians more (yielding better science), one counterpart quipped that computer scientists have dominated the Big Data landscape for two reasons: their sheer numbers and the white papers generated from the Computing Research Association (CRA) Computing Community Consortium (CCC) “Indeed, it didn’t take much digging to see the influence of CCC white papers. For example, a set of slides posted to the CRA website shows the progression from the publishing of […]

Code.org is putting CSEdWeek on steroids this year! My department, like many of yours, has traditionally run a programming contest and an open house in conjunction with Computer Science Education Week – the week of Grace Murray Hopper’s birthday each year. This year, Code.org has established a new, audacious goal:  have every student – every American, in fact – spend one hour learning to code!   A phenomenal new programming environment has been created to make this possible – students will learn about flow of control, etc., using a drag-and-drop interface, not by writing C or Java. This is a GREAT OPPORTUNITY for you to get involved with K-12 institutions in […]

Check out the webcast of the White House OSTP “Big Data” event, November 12, 2013 beginning at 1 p.m. ET, 10 a.m. PT. Webcast here: http://live.science360.gov/1/ Agenda (pdf) is linked from that page, but also here: http://tinyurl.com/OSTP-BD

It’s impossible to convey how great this year’s Microsoft Research Faculty Summit has been:  a “who’s who” of attendees from academia; heavy participation by top people from Microsoft Research; superb presentations on a range of research topics; and a total absence of marketing. I’m currently sitting in the final breakout session of the second day:  on quantum computing, with extraordinary talks by Scott Aaronson (MIT), Charlie Marcus (Niels Bohr Institute), and Matthias Troyer ETH Zürich).  But I’m missing concurrent sessions on machine learning (with Andrew Ng (Stanford and Coursera) and 3 others), beating spam (with Stefan Savage (UCSD) and two others), and visual motion (with Noah Snavely (Cornell) and two […]

Cameron Wilson, long-time Director of Public Policy for ACM, has been given a special assignment for 12 months to work at Code.org as Chief Operating Officer and Vice President of Government Relations. Code.org was founded by Seattle tech entrepreneur Hadi Partovi to create, launch, and lead a new initiative for scaling K-12 computer science education.  A phenomenal video produced as part of the launch attracted widespread attention.  Today, 9 out of 10 schools nationwide don’t offer computer science; in 40 states, computer science does not count towards math or science graduation requirements; the NCAA doesn’t consider computer science as an academic credit for aspiring student-athletes; the recent National Research Council “Framework […]

Steve Lohr reports in the New York Times: “A new report from the McKinsey Global Institute, the research arm of the consulting firm … not only selects a dozen ‘disruptive’ technologies from a candidate list of 100, but also measures their economic impact. “By 2025, the 12 technologies … have the potential to deliver economic value of up to $33 trillion a year worldwide, according to the McKinsey researchers.” The top six on the list: Mobile internet Automation of knowledge work Internet of Things Cloud Advanced Robotics Autonomous and near-autonomous vehicles As we have opined before, “All computer science, all the time …” Read the New York Times article here.