We’d like your help with a brainstorming exercise: Identify about a dozen game-changing advances from computing research conducted in the past 20 years. Here’s what we mean: The advance needs to be “game changing,” in the sense of dramatically altering how we think about computing and its applications. The importance of the advance needs to be obvious and easily appreciated by a wide audience. There needs to be a clear tie to computing research (or to infrastructure initiatives that build upon research and were sponsored by computing research organizations). We’re particularly interested in highlighting the impact of federally-funded university-based research. We’re focusing on work carried out in the past 20 […]

As recently announced on the Computing Research Policy Blog, the CRA and CCC web sites are now providing a weekly feature called “Computing Research Highlight of the Week.” If you are doing computing research, you are invited to submit your own work for possible inclusion in this weekly feature. These highlights are designed to provide easily digestible, compelling nuggets of computing research work. Members of Congress, the Administration, and funding agency managers and directors are some of the main audiences for these web pages. We believe the highlights should also prove to be useful for the entire research community. The highlights can be accessed directly, received by email, RSS feed, […]

Things always change fast in computing. But the rate of change seems to be on a major uptick recently. In this post, I want to focus on an accelerating driver of that change, a looming crisis on the horizon, and a surprising link between the two that may have big promise. In the spirit of blog discourse, let’s lay this out in broad strokes: The Industrial Revolution of Data. Today’s world-wide web remains a staggering tribute to the typing abilities of the human race. But even with a growing global population, typists are not a scalable source of bit-production going forward. We are entering an era where the overwhelming majority of […]

One of the visioning activities supported by the CCC is exploring the possibility of a compelling research agenda in the theoretical, experimental, and societal aspects of “network science and engineering” (NetSE). A NetSE Council has been established.  It’s chair, Ellen Zegura, provides this brief status report on the NetSE Council’s activities. Thanks for the opportunity to update the community on what has been happening recently with the Network Science and Engineering (NetSE) effort, from my perspective as chair of the NetSE Council. Let me explain my take on NetSE with an anecdote from my Georgia Tech colleague Mike Best based on a recent trip he made to Africa. Mike and […]

In previous posts on this blog, Berkeley’s David Patterson and Intel’s Andrew Chien presented their views on why research advances are needed to overcome the problems posed by multicore processors. In this piece — the third in a series -– Microsoft’s Dan Reed gives us his views on some of the potential benefits of progress in this research area. — For over thirty years, we have watched the great cycle of innovation defined by the commodity hardware/software ecosystem — faster processors enable software with new features and capabilities that in turn require faster processors, which beget new software. The great wheel has turned, but it no more, as power constraints […]

The problem of parallel computing is occupying the minds of a growing number of researchers. Why is this age-old concept so “hot” today? In this article — the second in a series of opinion pieces –Andrew Chien, Vice President and Corporate Technology Group Director for Intel Research, gives us his perspective on the issue, with a particular focus on the challenges facing us in education and funding.