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 […]

The AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellows at the National Science Foundation (NSF) have organized another talk in their Data Science Seminar Series from Bill Vass on DevOps at Amazon: A Look at Our Tools and Processes. The talk will be tomorrow, Tuesday, June 21, 2016 from 3:30PM-4:30PM EDT. Bill Vass, Vice President of Engineering at Amazon Web Services, where he oversees the team working on Amazon S3 Object Storage Service, Amazon Glacier, Simple Queuing Service, Simple Work Flow, Auto Scaling, Messaging, Transactional Systems, and Kinesis Streaming Services. With these projects, the Storage Services team runs the largest software defined storage system in the world, which is used by web-based companies, consumer companies, […]