The following is a letter to the community from James Kurose, Assistant Director, and Erwin Gianchandani, Deputy Assistant Director, of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Directorate of Computer & Information Science & Engineering (CISE).   Dear CISE Community, As the 2018-2019 academic year begins, we wanted to take a moment to highlight an important expansion of our broadening participation in computing (BPC) efforts. As a preface, let’s begin, though, by reflecting on the great strides that our community has made in improving access to computer science education at the K-12 level.  Just two years ago, The College Board launched a new Advanced Placement® (AP®) exam, Computer Science Principles (CSP).  Over 50,000 students took the exam […]

The following Great Innovative Idea is from Da Yan, tenure-track assistant professor in the Department of Computer Sciences at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB). Yan presented his poster, A Task-Centric Framework to Revolutionize Big Data Systems Research, at the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Early Career Researcher Symposium, August 1-2, 2018. The Idea Big Data frameworks such as Apache Hadoop and Apache Spark are becoming increasingly popular due to their emphasis on ease of programming, but they are dominantly designed for data-intensive iterative computations, and there lacks an efficient solution to compute-intensive Big Data analytics. Based on my insight that compute-intensive problems are often solved by divide and conquer (e.g., a recursive algorithm), a general task-centric framework, […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) will hold a workshop from January 3rd to 5th, 2019 in Hawaii to create a vision for thermodynamic computing, a statement of research needs, and a summary of the current state of understanding of this new area. Workshop attendance will be by invitation only and travel expenses will be available for select participants. We seek short white papers to help create the agenda for the workshop and select attendees. Thermodynamics has a long history in the engineering of computing systems due to its role in power consumption, scaling, and device performance [1],[2]. In a different context, thermodynamically motivated algorithmic techniques are prevalent and highly successful […]

The following is a letter to the community from Erwin Gianchandani, Acting Assistant Director, of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Directorate of Computer & Information Science & Engineering (CISE).   August 9, 2018 Dear Colleagues: The Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) is notifying members of the research community about the addition of a core program, called Foundations of Emerging Technologies (FET), within its Division of Computing and Communication Foundations (CCF). FET aims to enable radical innovations across all areas traditionally supported by CCF, through research in emerging computing and communication paradigms at the intersection of computing and biological systems, nanoscale science and engineering, quantum information science, and other nascent, yet […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) will hold a workshop from January 3rd to 5th, 2019 in Hawaii to create a vision for thermodynamic computing, a statement of research needs, and a summary of the current state of understanding of this new area. Workshop attendance will be by invitation only and travel expenses will be available for select participants. We seek short white papers to help create the agenda for the workshop and select attendees. Thermodynamics has a long history in the engineering of computing systems due to its role in power consumption, scaling, and device performance [1],[2]. In a different context, thermodynamically motivated algorithmic techniques are prevalent and highly successful […]

The National Science Foundation (NSF) needs YOU to help create the Big Ideas of the future! The NSF 2026 Idea Machine is a competition to help set the U.S. agenda for fundamental research in science and engineering. Participants can earn prizes and receive public recognition by suggesting the pressing research questions that need to be answered in the coming decade, the next set of “Big Ideas” for future investment by the NSF. It’s an opportunity for researchers, the public and other interested stakeholders to contribute to NSF’s mission to support basic research and enable new discoveries that drive the U.S. economy, enhance national security and advance knowledge to sustain the […]