Over the past 10 years, the Computing Community Consortium has hosted dozens of research visioning workshops to imagine, discuss, and debate the future of computing and its role in addressing societal needs. The Computing Research: Addressing National Priorities and Societal Needs Symposium will draw these topics into a program designed to illuminate current and future trends in computing and the potential for computing to address national challenges. The two days are organized around four main themes: The Impact of Computing in Our Physical World: New advances in robotics and the internet-of-things promise to reshape how people move and act in the world. This session will explore the implications of computing-powered advances for […]

Contributions to this post were made by Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council Member Kevin Fu, Associate Professor at the University of Michigan. Kevin also co-founded Virta Labs, a healthcare cybersecurity company. A growing number of medical devices are designed to be networked to facilitate patient care. However, as we have seen, networked medical devices and hospital records incorporate software that make them vulnerable to cybersecurity threats. Proactively addressing cybersecurity risks in hospitals reduces the patient safety impact and the overall risk to public health. On January 22, 2016, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) released a draft document to inform industry and FDA staff on recommendations for managing postmarket cybersecurity vulnerabilities for marketed medical devices. This document clarifies […]

The National Cancer Institute (NCI), part of the National Institutes of Health has launched an online platform to enable the research community and the public to submit ideas on the National Cancer Moonshot efforts. The goal of the Moonshot Initiative is to accelerate progress in the fight against cancer by swiftly advancing knowledge from cutting-edge basic research to new prevention and treatment strategies for patients, said NCI Acting Director Douglas Lowy, M.D. The community involvement that the initiative garners will allow us to consider novel, creative ideas that might not otherwise have come to NCI’s attention. Submissions will be considered by the Blue Ribbon Panel (BRP) of scientific experts and […]

On June 6, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) will host the 2016 Video Analytics in Public Safety (VAPS) Workshop, a satellite workshop of the Public Safety Communications Research (PSCR) Broadband Stakeholder Meeting on June 7-9.  The goal of the VAPS workshop will be to create an environment where technical stakeholders of all types can exchange knowledge, practices, needs, challenges, issues, and ideas to jointly identify the critical R&D, resources, standards, and collaboration vehicles and infrastructure to support the creation of a robust public safety video analytics R&D ecosystem. The VAPS workshop is intended to inform national strategy for video analytics R&D and to lay the foundation for the […]

The organizing committee for the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) sponsored Promoting Strategic Research on Inclusive Access to Rich Online Content and Services has released their workshop report. The workshop, held in September 2015, brought together almost 40 experts to address the challenges and future research opportunities about access to online content and services. They focused on six active research areas, automatic description of image and video content, online support for deaf people, access to textual content for people with language and learning disabilities, inclusive design of games and simulations, access to large quantitative datasets, maps and 3D printing, and software architecture for configurability. The participants found three main steps that need to be developed in order to […]

The next WATCH talk, called Crypto Wars: Plus ça Change, Plus c’est la Même Chose is Thursday, April 21, 2016 from Noon-1pm EDT. The presenter will be Susan Landau, professor of Cybersecurity Policy in the Department of Social Science and Policy Studies at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Landau works at the intersection of cybersecurity, national security, law, and policy. During the Crypto Wars of the 1990s, her insights on how government encryption policy skewed civil society and business needs for security helped win the argument for a relaxation of cryptographic export controls. Beginning in the early 2000s, Landau was an early voice in the argument that law-enforcement requirements for embedding surveillance within […]