A friend of mine from Field X once served as a program officer at a major research funding agency. (Names changed to protect the innocent.) As part of a quality assurance scheme, he was asked to review the proposal process for Field Y. He was surprised that every proposal he looked at, whether funded or not, was rated very high. He asked the program officer for Field Y how proposals could be ranked if they were all rated so high. He was told to pay no attention to the rating, but to look at what the reviewer said. So my friend looked at a number of highly-rated proposals. He found […]

Your faithful correspondent recently attended the paired ACM-BCS Visions of Computer Science 2010 and UKCRC Grand Challenges conferences at Edinburgh University.  (Due to volcanic ash and the resulting travel snarls, this correspondent’s stay in the UK has been extended longer than expected!) The Visions conference was designed to highlight research visions for the future and consisted of invited plenaries and submitted talks. The plenaries were extremely well done.  Ross Anderson spoke about the integration of social issues and computing in the design of increasingly complex systems, using numerous examples from history and economic theory. Nicolò Cesa-Bianchi explored frontiers in machine learning, Jon Kleinberg spoke about the future of social networks, […]

What is it with disasters? They’re coming fast and furious. Here’s the 411 on robots at the China quake. The Qinghai quake is the latest of the series of tragedies. Prof. Bin Li at the Shenyang Institute of Automation and an active member of the IEEE Technical Committee on Safety Security Rescue Robots, contacted the Chinese national earthquake response service this morning. It doesn’t look like ground robots are appropriate– the structures are mostly small and constructed from brick and mud. That type of construction is problematic– the brick and mud turns to a liquidized dust, acting like water to fill all the voids and displaces air. Even if there […]

The National Science Foundation is commencing a national search for the NSF’s Assistant Director for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) and seeks your assistance in the identification of candidates. The Assistant Director for CISE leads a directorate comprised of three divisions: Computing and Communication Foundations; Computer and Network Systems; and Information and Intelligent Systems.  The CISE directorate is also a major contributor to NSF’s cyberinfrastructure investments through the Office of Cyberinfrastructure. The search committee will be headed by Dr. Susan Graham, Pehong Chen Distinguished Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley.  The qualifications for the Assistant Director include: outstanding leadership; a deep […]

Several sources report that MIT’s Dean of Engineering, Subra Suresh, is to be nominated to be the new Director of NSF.  Previously, Dr. Suresh was chair of the MIT Department of Materials Science and Engineering.

In the area of Computing Architectures there are some well known discontinuity-inducing trends staring us in the face. The entire computing community is planning for multi-core processors, a necessary order of magnitude(s) increase in the performance/power ratio, ‘failure is an option’ with the advent of millions of cores … and one of the holy grails, easier paralleling programming at scale. Adapting to these trends and necessities is tough and will require non-linear thinking, not just extrapolations of current trends. Statement like this are, of course, motherhood and apple pie. Computing architecture researchers have faced all of these challenges for years and there are numerous projects forging into the future to […]