Less than six weeks ago we launched the Computing Innovation Fellows Project.  In that short time, more than 1,200 people announced their interest in hosting a CIFellow on our mentor website, and 526 applications for CIFellowships were completed and forwarded to the Selection Committee for review. The website for submitting applications was taken down on schedule at midnight on June 9, and the reviewing process commenced two days later. We’ve been very busy reviewing ever since, assigning each application to multiple reviewers, to guarantee a minimum of three reviews for each awardee. We are targeting July 10 for completing the review and decision process. The 526 applications come from 415 […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) and the Computing Research Association (CRA), with funding from the National Science Foundation, are pleased to announce an opportunity for new PhD graduates in computer science and closely related fields to obtain one-to-two year positions at host organizations including universities, industrial research laboratories, and other organizations that advance the field of computing and its positive impact on society. The Computing Innovation Fellows (CIFellows) Project will fund as many as 60 such positions. Applications are due very soon: June 9, 2009. Awards are expected to be announced by July 10. Positions will commence in Autumn 2009. Go to http://cifellows.org to apply to be a CIFellow. Also: […]

A contribution from Susan Graham, the Pehong Chen Professor of Computer Science at the University of California at Berkeley, and co-chair of the CCC Council: I’ve just returned from the CCC-organized Symposium on “Computing Research that Changed the World.” (http://www.cra.org/ccc/locsymposium.php) It was a marvelous experience. There were 12 wonderful 15-minute talks that highlighted major achievements in computing in the last 10-20 years, the research advances that enabled them, and the opportunities to move forward in the various fields in the years ahead. In the morning, Al Spector outlined the technologies that enable us to google, Eric Brewer explained the emergence of the cloud, and Luis von Ahn showed us how […]

Rescue Robots at the Cologne Germany Building Collapse I finished The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death by Charlie Huston just before the City Archives collapsed in Cologne, Germany, on March 3. I soon found myself at my 11th disaster, but unlike Webb, the protagonist who must come to grips with the events that led him to a janitorial job cleaning up trauma sites, I was clear on why I was there standing in the rain. I was there in the hope that we could make a difference with technology — that we could enable the fire rescue teams to save a life, prevent a responder’s death, or […]

Ed Lazowska and Peter Lee on November 4 proposed a brainstorming exercise to identify about a dozen game-changing advances in computing research over the past 20 years. A large number of people responded, as summarized in a November 30 post. The CCC has organized a really important symposium on March 25 that has short talks on 12 such advances. Check out http://www.cra.org/ccc/locsymposium.php for details. I think that this symposium is really important because with a new administration in Washington, we have people who appreciate the importance of fundamental research. If we increase the size of the funding pie, all of us will benefit. The best way to increase the size […]

Last week the New York Times printed an article by John Markoff entitled, Do We Need a New Internet? In the article, Markoff states, “…there is a growing belief among engineers and security experts that Internet security and privacy have become so maddeningly elusive that the only way to fix the problem is to start over.” Stanford’s Nick McKeown is quoted in the article, “Unless we’re willing to rethink today’s Internet, we’re just waiting for a series of public catastrophes.” The article speculates that in a new network architecture, some users would “give up their anonymity and certain freedoms in return for safety.” It’s certainly exciting to see core computer […]