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, […]

The South Big Data Hub links talented students with tech startups through a DataStart program, which provides real-world experiences for students while helping entrepreneurial companies. Graduate students from six universities in the southern U.S. will spend the summer working on data challenges important to the success of new and growing technology companies thanks to a new program called the Southern Startup Internship Program in Data Science (DataStart). Through DataStart, interns will have the opportunity to address a wide range of data-related business problems in a professional setting, including spotting trends in the diversity of people included in clinical trials, developing methods for using sensor data to detect loads on wind turbines, […]

Contributions to this post were provided by Meredith M. Lee, Executive Director of the West Data Hub from UC Berkeley. On Thursday June 16th, the West Big Data Innovation Hub and DataScience, Inc. will co-host a workshop titled “The Science of Data-Driven Storytelling” in Culver City, California. The West Big Data Hub is one of four National Science Foundation (NSF) sponsored Big Data Regional Innovation Hubs that the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is partnering with to sponsor a program on Industry-Academic Collaboration. The CCC asked each Hub to create a plan aligned with their region’s needs and opportunities to foster partnerships, benefitting early career academic researchers as well as the […]

The next WATCH talk, called Welcome to the Panopticon(s) is Thursday, June 16th, 2016 from Noon-1pm EDT. The presenter will be Nicholas Weaver. He received a B.A. in Astrophysics and Computer Science in 1995, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science in 2003 from the University of California, Berkeley. Although his dissertation was on novel FPGA architectures, he also focused on computer security, including postulating the possibility of very fast computer worms in 2001. He joined the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) in 2003. His primary research focus is on network security, notably worms, botnets, surveillance, and other internet-scale attacks, and network measurement. Other areas have included both hardware acceleration and software […]