Are you helping organize a conference in the near future? Consider having a Blue Sky Ideas Conference Track!  The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) sponsors an initiative to bring special “Blue Sky Ideas” tracks to leading computer science research conferences. The goal of this initiative is to help conferences reach out beyond the usual research papers that present completed work and to seek out papers that present ideas and visions that can stimulate the research community to pursue new directions. Conferences may request CCC sponsorship of such tracks along with a CCC grant that provides prize money for the top 3 papers (first prize $1000, second prize $750, and third prize $500), to be awarded […]

The South Big Data Hub’s next Data Science Roundtable called The Role of Data Science in the Economy will be held Wednesday, September 27th from Noon – 1:15 PM EST. The roundtable will share the results of a recent report by the North Carolina Office of Science, Technology and Innovation and National Consortium for Data Science that investigates the data economy in North Carolina. The panelists will also discuss and answer questions surrounding the role of data science in the economy.   To attend in person, please RSVP to subers@renci.org. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) 100 Europa Drive Chapel Hill, NC 27517 Directions to RENCI To participate […]

Recently, the National Science Foundation (NSF) has been looking to highlight the value of convergence. The deep integration of multiple disciplines in order to advance scientific discovery and innovation. As a result, they have announced their first set of convergence awards. The 23 newly awarded projects will foster convergence to address grand challenges in the context of five of NSF’s “10 Big Ideas for Future NSF Investments,” a set of cutting-edge research agendas uniquely suited for NSF’s broad portfolio of investments. One of these five ideas is work in the human technology frontier space. This is also, quintessentially, one of the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) 2017-2018 task forces. The Human Technology Frontier task force focuses on the […]

The next WATCH talk, called The Science of Deep Specification is Thursday, September 21st, from 12 PM-1 PM EST. The presenter is Benjamin Pierce, a Henry Salvatori Professor of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania and a Fellow of the ACM. His research interests include programming languages, type systems, language-based security, computer-assisted formal verification, differential privacy, and synchronization technologies. He is the author of the widely used graduate textbooks Types and Programming Languages and Software Foundations. He has served as co-Editor in Chief of the Journal of Functional Programming, as Managing Editor for Logical Methods in Computer Science, and as editorial board member of Mathematical Structures in Computer Science, Formal Aspects of Computing, and […]

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 Colleagues, We are pleased to announce that the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) has formed a search committee for the next Division Director for its Division of Computing and Communication Foundations (CCF). As many of you know, Rao Kosaraju, who has served as CCF Division Director since January 2015, will be completing his rotation and returning to his institution, Johns Hopkins University, this coming January.  While at NSF/CISE, Rao has provided truly outstanding […]

The following is a guest blog post from CCC Council Member and Cybersecurity Task Force Chair Kevin Fu from the University of Michigan. “From pacemakers to autonomous vehicles, national computing research and education initiatives for embedded security will lay a crucial foundation for the Internet of Everything era,” says Fu. Last month, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued the first major recall of a medical device because of a cybersecurity risk. Nearly half a million pacemakers were recalled for a software update that clinicians will apply during a patient’s in-clinic visit. Our team has spent a decade analyzing security problems and solutions in pacemakers and other medical devices. While […]