Today’s issue of Science Magazine has an article by Luis von Ahn, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University, and several of his colleagues. The article describes the principles and experience behind reCAPTCHA, the “human computation” system that enables web sites to stop spambots while simultaneously digitizing books. As I mention on my personal blog (at http://csdiary.org), this points out a somewhat strange aspect of computing research, namely that there isn’t much computing research in the major core-science publications. I’m thinking specifically of Science magazine, Nature, and PNAS. In fact, I took a quick scan over the past 5 issues of Science and Nature.  Over those issues, in Science […]

Researchers working in areas spanning computer architecture, programming languages, operating systems, algorithms, and more have been thinking harder about the problem of parallel computing. Why has the age-old concept of parallelism become so “hot” today? To provide the first of an upcoming series of opinion pieces, we asked David Patterson, Professor in Computer Science at UC Berkeley, to give us his thoughts, and the rationale for increased government funding to solve the multicore challenge.

The Computing Community Consortium was programmed as the closing plenary session at the 2008 CRA Conference at Snowbird — a once-every-two-years gathering of the heads of CRA’s member organizations. Interest was strong — more than 125 department chairs and lab directors attended the 90-minute session, more than 3X as many as have stuck around for any previous final session at Snowbird. Ed Lazowska, Susan Graham, Richard Ladner, Randy Bryant, and Chip Elliott presented. All presentation materials are on the web here. A 20-minute Q&A session followed the presentations. Several highlights for me: CCC’s “Data-Intensive Scalable Computing” initiative, led by Randy Bryant and Thomas Kwan, has really taken off:  two new […]

In the last few hours we’ve learned that the main CCC web site design, which was modeled on an issue of A List Apart, was used without appropriate permission. It was certainly never the intention of the CCC to violate copyright and we have taken immediate steps to discontinue use of the design. We’ve conveyed our apologies to Jeffery Zeldman, the original designer, and apologize for any disruption the site redesign may cause.

I regularly am contacted by reporters who read the CRA “Taulbee Survey” and inquire about the current state of computer science undergraduate enrollments. Here’s what I said last night to the most recent reporter who inquired: The Taulbee Survey “headline” this year was (roughly) “computer science bachelors degrees drop again.” In my view, this is not news — it was entirely predictable from the legitimate headline four years ago: (roughly) “freshman interest and new enrollments drop again.” The actual news right now in the CRA data is that freshman interest and new enrollments seem to be stabilizing and turning the corner — starting to trend upward. “Degrees granted” is a […]

I had the opportunity to attend the CCC-sponsored workshop, “A Research Roadmap for Robotics in Manufacturing and Automation“, which took place in Washington, DC on June 17, 2008. Below is a loosely-edited excerpt of the notes I took during the workshop. The intention is to convey a general sense of what happened at this meeting, and how we can apply the lessons of this workshop to other CCC initiatives. Workshop Notes (excerpts) There were 35 people in attendance, including Joe Bordogna (former COO NSF), Clint Kelly (formerly DARPA), Elena Messina (NIST), William Joyner (Semiconductor Research Corporation), people from industry (General Motors, General Electric, ABB, C&S Whole Grocers, Willow Garage,…), plus […]