The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) has released its 2018 list of newly elevated fellows. The IEEE Grade of Fellow is given to a IEEE member with an extraordinary record of accomplishments in any of the IEEE fields of interest by the Board of Directors. This year’s list features a number of impressive computer scientists, including Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council members Jennifer Rexford, Princeton University, for contributions to network management and associated routing systems and Kevin Fu, University of Michigan, for contributions to embedded and medical device security. Congratulations to all the recipients for their accomplishments! To learn more about the IEEE Fellows and to view fellows from previous years visit the IEEE Fellows webpage.

National Science Foundation (NSF) Assistant Director for the Directorate of Computer & Information Science & Engineering (CISE) James Kurose has issued the following letter to the community to request information on Mid-scale Research Infrastructure. Dear Colleague Letter: Request for Information on Mid-scale Research Infrastructure October 6, 2017 Overview This Request for Information (RFI) is issued in response to the American Innovation and Competitiveness Act (AICA, Public Law No. 114-329), Section 109. NSF seeks information on existing and future needs for mid-scale research infrastructure projects from the US-based NSF science and engineering community. Definitions For the purposes of this RFI, NSF defines Research Infrastructure (RI) as any combination of facilities, equipment, instrumentation, computational hardware and software, and […]

The following blog post was drafted by CCC Chair Beth Mynatt, CCC Exec Member Ben Zorn, and CCC Council Members Elizabeth Bradley, Sampath Kannan, and Cynthia Dwork. Beth Mynatt, CCC Chair, recently submitted the following letter to the Editor of the New York Times: In her November 14th Op-Ed, Cathy O’Neil makes the case that technology is impacting people’s lives at an accelerating pace and that computer scientists have been “asleep at the wheel” in dealing with emerging challenges. Computing research advances have had sweeping societal effects, but not without problems (e.g. racial bias in facial recognition). Careful design is critical to heading off “unintended consequences” resulting from one-sided research […]

TIME’s 25 best inventions of 2017 are a mixture of fun little gadgets like the fidget spinner, a DIY cooking companion called Tasty One Top, and delicious treats like Halo Top ice cream. What is surprising, however, is that most of the inventions from the list this year are either a product of computer science research or have been greatly influenced by it. Here are some examples: Jibo – A robot that “experiences the world and reacts with expressive movements and responses.” While that technology may seem merely amusing (or creepy), it could as TIME points out be fundamentally reshaping the way we interact with machines. eSight 3– A powerful pair of glasses that […]

Check out the following updates from Data Science at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Important this week: Big Data Science with the BD2K-LINCS Data Coordination and Integration Center – MOOC on Coursera. November 27, 2017, 12am – 12am. Learn various methods of analysis including unsupervised clustering, gene-set enrichment analysis, interactive data visualization, and supervised machine learning with application to data from the Library of Integrated Network-based Cellular Signature (LINCS) program, and other relevant Big Data from high content molecular omics data and phenotype profiling of mammalian cells. The BD2K Guide to the Fundamentals of Data Science: Data Science Needs for Biomedical Research. Ian Foster, University of Chicago. December 1, 2017, 9am – 10am. For more information, please visit […]

The following Great Innovative Idea is from Da Yan, an assistant professor in the Department of Computer and Information Sciences (CIS) at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB). Yan presented his poster, Big Data Frameworks: Bridging High Performance of HPC Community with Programming Friendliness of Data Science Community, at the CCC Symposium on Computing Research, October 23-24, 2017. The Idea Existing Big Data frameworks such as Hadoop, Spark and Google’s Pregel emphasize on programming simplicity, where a distributed algorithm can be written with just a few lines of code. However, they only target data-intensive analytics, where the workloads are mainly generated by data volume, and network communication is the performance bottleneck. For compute-intensive tasks where the […]