After leading the world in telecommunications research innovations, the United States now trails several dozen other nations in the availability of broadband to consumers.  The Obama administration’s broadband stimulus initiative represents an extraordinary opportunity to re-gain the lead. The Computing Community Consortium, working with a remarkable coalition of all the major groups involved in cyberinfrastructure for research and education, has been weighing in heavily on broadband strategy.  This week, the Chronicle of Higher Education featured this group’s position paper, “Unleashing Waves of Innovation.” Our basic messages – consistent with the position advocated by Microsoft and others: Use an aggressive definition of broadband – 100 mbps – in order to be […]

Slides from all speakers at the remarkable March 25th Library of Congress symposium “Computing Research that Changed the World:  Reflections and Perspectives” are now available: http://www.cra.org/ccc/locsymposium_slides.php Videos of all talks will be available soon. Previous posts describing the symposium are available here and here. Many thanks to our speakers for preparing and delivering such wonderful talks, and for making their materials available to the community at large.

Susan Graham provided a great overview in a post a few days ago of the Computing Community Consortium’s March 25th day-long Library of Congress symposium, “Computing Research that Changed the World:  Reflections and Perspectives.”  I thought I’d provide a few additional details — as well as a reminder that all materials (slides, videos, a summary booklet, etc.) will be available on the CCC website in the very near future. Inspiration for the program came from a large number of responses from the computing research community to two November CCC blog posts — this was your symposium! Each of the talks was superb.  Honestly, in 35 years in the field, I’ve […]

An op-ed by the University of Washington’s Ed Lazowska and Sun Microsystems’ Bob Sproull appears today on the website of Scientists and Engineers for America.  They write: “Congress is now debating the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. Included in this package is over 10 billion dollars for science facilities, research, and instrumentation. “The reason for this inclusion is simple: today’s research is tomorrow’s infrastructure. “When our nation faces immediate challenges, the feasible solutions depend upon the ideas, resources, and designs that are “on the shelf,” ready to deploy … “Increasingly, information technology is the cornerstone of America’s infrastructure. Today’s information technology research is a cornerstone of tomorrow’s infrastructure.” […]

This new DoD S&T video is absolutely worth 4:56 of your time! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_lLDNosedHk It’s inspirational. — Ed Lazowska

In a November 4 post, we asked your help in identifying game-changing advances from computing research conducted in the past 20 years.  We primed the pump with four examples: The Internet and the World Wide Web as we know them today Search technology – Where once we filed, today we search Cluster computing The transformation of science via computation In this post, we summarize just a sample of your additions (we have grabbed text from your posted comments, without a lot of editing, so this will be loose – “it’s the thoughts that count”) and invite your further comments – cleaning up these additions, or providing others.  Please let us hear […]