Today, January 17th, is the anniversary of the 1995 Kobe, Japan, earthquake which killed over 6,000 people. I am in Japan, ironically, accepting the Motohiro Kisoi Award for academic contributions to rescue engineering.  I am thinking about Haiti, what is and what might have been. My Japanese hosts at the International Rescue Systems institute are sanguine about the long delays in getting new technologies from the labs and into the hands of the responders, agencies, and the victims themselves. It takes time, they say.  They are patient; it took 5 years to rebuild Kobe with the resources of one of the great nations of the world. During my visit this week and […]

The Cross-layer Reliability Visioning Study Group met October 29-30 at the IBM Austin Research Center in Austin, Texas. This was the third of three scheduled meetings focused on the growing challenges imposed by changes in device technology, system sizes, and application requirements.  A major goal of the Cross-layer Reliability Visioning process is to reach some consensus on how to achieve reliable computing using unpredictable components across different layers that dictate system reliability (i.e., device technology, design, architecture, software).  While the first two meetings focused on defining the multi-dimensional cross-layer reliability design space and presented cross-layer challenges as viewed from a range of application domains (e.g., consumer electronics, space/avionics, etc.), the […]

The CCC co-sponsored and co-organized the Discovery and Innovation in Health IT Workshop in San Francisco on October 29 and 30, 2009 (http://cra.org/ccc/visioning/visioning-activities/2012-activities/health-it/ ). The Discovery and Innovation in Health IT Workshop was an attempt to make further inroads on productive collaboration between healthcare and computing, exploring and defining fundamental computing research challenges and opportunities in healthcare IT in both the near- and long-term and identifying a range of “model” proof-of-concept, integrative systems that might serve as motivating and unifying forces to drive fundamental research in healthcare IT. Highlights of the workshop included plenary presentations by William Stead of Vanderbilt and Richard Bucholz of St. Louis University School of Medicine. […]

Deadline:  December 11, 2009 What questions shape our intellectual future? What attracts the best and brightest minds of a new generation? What are the next big computing ideas – the ones that will define the future of computing, galvanize the very best students, and catalyze research investment and public support? The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is charged with mobilizing the computing research community to answer these questions by identifying major research opportunities for the field, and by creating venues for community participation in this process. The CCC supports these efforts through advocacy with federal agencies, through visioning activities such as workshops, through arranging plenary talks on key topics at major […]

Congress has resolved that the week of December 7 will be designated as “National Computer Science Education Week.”  Organizations such as the ACM, CRA, and NCWIT, along with industrial partners, are planning to use this week to promote awareness of computer science education. The NSF has invested in a number of programs that seek to  re-envision K-12 and undergraduate computer science education.  A recent article by Jeannette Wing, Assistant Director of NSF for CISE, summarizes the rationale, the challenges, and some of the specific initiatives. We’re eager to hear your ideas on ways that computer science education could be improved, both at the K-12  and college level.  We’re also  interested […]

Why should you care about microbial communities? Except for viruses, they are the most abundant life on Earth and have an overwhelming effect on our environment and our lives. Consider that about half the carbon dioxide on Earth is processed through microbes that live in the oceans. Then consider that the most modern climate models of ocean life include just five organisms. This is despite recent findings that point to thousands of oceanic species, which do many different things and presumably influence our climate. Metagenomics is a relatively new field that seeks to understand the structure and function of the shockingly large number of microorganisms on our planet.  New technologies […]