Today, July 1st, is the start of a new term at CCC! The new Computing Community Consortium (CCC) leadership, Elizabeth Mynatt and Mark Hill will assume their roles as Chair and Vice Chair respectively for two-years, while Greg Hager is stepping down after two years as Chair. The other members of the CCC Executive Committee include Jennifer Rexford, Princeton University, and Ben Zorn, Microsoft Research. In addition to a new Exec Committee, four new CCC Council members will us join us for the start of their three-year terms, Sampath Kannan, University of Pennsylvania, Maja Matarić, University of Southern California, Nina Mishra, Amazon Research, and Holly Rushmeier, Yale University. The CCC and CRA thank Greg Hager and those Council members […]

The White House recently released their list of 100 examples of President Obama’s leadership in science, technology, and innovation. The list includes many computing related commitments such as supported millions of students with ConnectEd, created a new pipeline for well-paying tech jobs, and called for computer science education for all. The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) has contributed to many of these examples. #34 is the National Robotics Initiative (NRI). In June 2011, the Administration established the National Robotics Initiative to spur research and development in a variety of robotics applications, including healthcare, agriculture, manufacturing, space exploration, and national security. The CCC’s 2008 Robotics Roadmap was a key catalyst for the NRI and […]

The Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) just released a Request For Information (RFI) on Artificial Intelligence. Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies offer great promise for creating new and innovative products, growing the economy, and advancing national priorities in areas such as education, mental and physical health, addressing climate change, and more. Like any transformative technology, however, AI carries risks and presents complex policy challenges along a number of different fronts. The Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) is interested in developing a view of AI across all sectors for the purpose of recommending directions for research and determining challenges and opportunities in this field. The views of the […]

Contributions to this post were provided by Meredith M. Lee, Executive Director of the West Data Hub from UC Berkeley. President Obama released a proclamation announcing June 17 through June 23, 2016 as National Week of Making. He called upon all Americans to observe this week with programs, ceremonies, and activities that encourage a new generation of makers and manufacturers to share their talents, solutions, and skills. From the press release: During National Week of Making, we recommit to sparking the creative confidence of all Americans and to giving them the skills, mentors, and resources they need to harness their passion and tackle some of our planet’s greatest challenges… Over […]

CCC Council Member Ben Zorn and his co-author Emery Berger were recently honored with the Most Influential PLDI Paper Award by ACM SIGPLAN for their 2006 paper DieHard: probabilistic memory safety for unsafe languages. SIGPLAN is a Special Interest Group of ACM that focuses on Programming Languages. In particular, SIGPLAN explores the design, implementation, theory, and efficient use of programming languages and associated tools. The Most Influential PLDI Paper Award is presented annually to the author(s) of a paper presented at the PLDI held 10 years prior to the award year. The award includes a prize of $1,000 to be split among the authors of the winning paper. The papers […]

The following Great Innovative Idea is from Gloria Washington, an Assistant Professor of computer science at Howard University. In addition to being an Assistant Professor, Dr. Washington is the Director of the Affective Biometrics Lab. Washington presented her poster, A Socio-Cultural & Technical Approach to Affective Biometrics, at the CCC Symposium on Computing Research, May 9-10, 2016. The Idea Traditional approaches to biometric recognition and affective computing involve using a database to train computer algorithms to recognize different types of individuals and emotional states. However, these databases are usually not diverse and include only subjects from majority populations. Howard University is developing technologies that can use computer vision and affective […]