Jeff Naughton, a top database researcher from the University of Wisconsin – Madison, has made available a superb keynote that he gave at the 26th IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering.  It will be worth your time to read and think about Jeff’s slides – “We guarantee it!”

CCC Council chair Ed Lazowska is one of eight columnists featured in a New York Times “Room for Debate” essay series on education.  Lazowska says: “There are a few facts about education, employability and economic growth that we should keep in mind. “A balanced education serves you best … “The further out you are from college graduation, the less your success is attributable to the field in which you majored, and the more your success is attributable to a set of abilities imparted by any top-tier bachelor’s-level education … “But let us not fool ourselves about what fields offer job opportunities, create jobs for others and drive the economy … […]

The New York Times picks up on a point made in the recent report of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology assessing the Federal Networking and Information Technology R&D program:  “performance gains in doing computing tasks that result from improvements in software algorithms often far outpace the gains attributable to faster processors.” “The rate of change in hardware captured by Moore’s Law, experts agree, is an extraordinary achievement. ‘But the ingenuity that computer scientists have put into algorithms has yielded performance improvements that make even the exponential gains of Moore’s Law look trivial,’ said Edward Lazowska, a professor at the University of Washington. “The rapid pace of […]

Congressman Rush Holt of New Jersey – the only physicist in Congress, one of the staunchest Congressional supporters of science, recipient of this year’s Philip Hauge Abelson Award from the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a five-time Jeopardy! champion – has defeated IBM’s Watson AI system at Jeopardy! As much as we value the extraordinary accomplishments of Watson and of the AI field, score one for the people!  We need more of them like Rush Holt in Congress! Read about the match here.

You gotta love having geeks in the White House!  In this short video, Austan Goolsbee, Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, explains the National Wireless Initiative, which includes a significant research component.  Watch the video here.  Learn more about the National Wireless Initiative here.

The National Academy of Engineering has announced the newly-elected Members of the Class of 2011.  The nine new Members of Section 5 (Computer Science & Engineering) are: Susan Dumais, Microsoft Research Daphne Koller, Stanford University Hank Levy, University of Washington Jitendra Malik, UC Berkeley Nick McKeown, Stanford University Don Norman, Northwestern University Ari Requischa, University of Southern California Fred Schneider, Cornell University Mihalis Yannakakis, Columbia University In addition, Jonathan Rose (University of Toronto) was elected as a Foreign Associate. Quoting from the NAE:  “Members are elected to NAE by their peers (current NAE members). Election to membership is one of the highest professional honors accorded an engineer.  Members have distinguished […]