The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy has directed that the published results of federally funded research (final peer-reviewed manuscripts or final published documents) be freely available to the public within one year of publication, and that researchers better account for and manage the digital data resulting from federally funded scientific research. Nice knowin’ ya, Springer and Elsevier … The OSTP blog post, with the new policy memorandum linked, is available here.

The Computing Community Consortium is governed by an 18-member Council, with members on 3-year staggered terms. The CCC’s Nominating Committee invites nominations (including self-nominations) for members to serve on the CCC Council for the next three years. Please send nominations, together with the information below, to ccc-nominations@cra.org by 11:59pm ET on Monday, March 11, 2013. The committee’s recommendations will serve as input to the Computing Research Association and National Science Foundation, who will make the final selection. Nominations must include the following information: Name, affiliation, and email address of the nominee. Research interests. Previous significant service to the research community and other relevant experience, with years it occurred (no more […]

On February 14, Kelly Gaither (Texas Advanced Computing Center), Kathryn McKinley (Microsoft Research), and Ed Lazowska (University of Washington and Computing Community Consortium) testified to the Subcommittee on Research of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology at a hearing on “Applications for Information Technology Research & Development.” Lazowska sang a familiar refrain:  Research often takes a long time before it pays off – often 15 years or more. Research often pays off in unanticipated ways – we can’t predict what the biggest impact will be. Advances in one sector enable advances in other sectors. The research ecosystem is fueled by the flow of people and ideas back and […]

Here’s a “must read” article for you HCI types:  a New York Times obituary for John E. Karlin, a Bell Labs industrial psychologist who is responsible for 7-digit dialing, the layout of the touch tone pad, the length of the cord on telephones (back when they had cords), and a slew of other “everyday things.” “A generation ago, when the poetry of PEnnsylvania and BUtterfield was about to give way to telephone numbers in unpoetic strings, a critical question arose: Would people be able to remember all seven digits long enough to dial them? “And when, not long afterward, the dial gave way to push buttons, new questions arose: round […]

Election to the National Academy of Engineering – which has roughly 2,000 members across a dozen fields – is one of the highest professional honors accorded to engineers in academia, industry and government. Today, the NAE Class of 2013 was announced – 69 new Members and 11 new Foreign Associates.  Elected in Section 5, Computer Science & Engineering, were: Anant Agarwal, president, edX (online learning initiative of MIT and Harvard University), and professor, electrical engineering and computer science department, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge. For contributions to shared-memory and multicore computer architectures. David Dill, professor, department of computer science, Stanford University, Stanford, Calif. For the development of techniques to verify hardware, software, […]

Martha Pollack, University of Michigan Professor of EECS and past Dean of their School of Information, has been selected as Michigan’s next Provost. This is another sign of the increasing influence of computer scientists in leadership positions at forward-looking universities:  Stanford (John Hennessy, President), Harvey Mudd (Maria Klawe, President), MIT (Eric Grimson, Chancellor), now Michigan. Congratulations Martha! Read more here.