Ian Foster, former Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council Member and Professor at the University of Chicago and Division Director at Argonne National Laboratory, was just named the 2022 Ken Kennedy award recipient. Presented by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Computer Society (IEEE-CS) the Ken Kennedy Award is an annual honor recognizing contributions to programmability and productivity in computing and community service or mentoring contributions. You can see past award winners here. Foster is recognized for his substantial contributions in accelerating scientific discovery in computational science by establishing innovative, newfangled applications of distributed computing both within supercomputers and over networks. His work […]

The National Science Foundations (NSF) newly established Directorate for Technology, Innovation and Partnerships (TIP) sent out their first quarterly newsletter. The newsletter is intended to update the community on existing investments, new initiatives/funding opportunities, events, job opportunities and more. TIP was established earlier this year to catalyze innovation and research in emerging technologies and encourage collaboration across disciplines and sectors to address pivotal challenges facing our country and maintain our country’s competitive edge in the technology sphere. A couple highlights from this weeks newsletter include: Last week President Biden signed into law the bipartisan CHIPS and Science Act of 2022, which officially authorizes the TIP directorate. NSF Regional Innovation Engines, […]

Last month, CCC council member Katie Siek, along with two PhD student collaborators, Zaidat Ibrahim and Alexander Hayes from Indiana University, released an article in the journal The Conversation about public concern regarding the use of period tracking apps.    Recently, many, including researchers and experts, have voiced apprehension over using period tracking applications since the overturn of Roe v. Wade, fearing that state and local governments may attempt to subpoena user’s period data from the owners of these apps. Some have even gone so far as to input false data into these period tracking apps, in the hopes that this “junk data” will confuse the applications’ algorithms, and cause […]

Quantum computing has exploded onto the scene and increasingly gained traction as the computing field moves toward the end of Moore’s Law. Viewed as a next step in improving the speed and efficiency of computing and tackling increasingly intricate problems, quantum computing uses quantum mechanical properties to express and manipulate information as quantum bits or qubits offering large potential speedups with processing. The capabilities and possibilities that quantum computing offers has garnered interest across many disciplines leading to a shortage in the quantum workforce. The University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering and the Chicago Quantum Exchange is working to close this gap with a new Certificate in Quantum […]

First announced at President Biden’s Summit for Democracy, the U.S./U.K. privacy-enhancing technologies prize challenges, are now open for registration. Co-sponsored by the National Institute for Standards and Technology and the National Science Foundation, and planned in coordination with the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and counterparts in the United Kingdom, the prize challenges seek to catalyze research to bring about solutions to financial crime and public health emergencies. Solutions to pressing global issues such as preventing financial cybercrime and enhancing pandemic response capabilities requires vast amount of high quality data. Privacy-enhancing technologies will enable the cultivation and analysis of large datasets without jeopardizing a citizens’ fundamental right […]

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) has made huge strides in the past decade. A large part of this progress can be attributed to large quantities of accessible datasets and computing resources. Recently many federal agencies have started to invest in leveraging commercial cloud computing resources to advance AI/ML research and development (R&D). The White House’s National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) and AI Subcommittee just released a report on Lessons Learned from Federal Use of Cloud Computing to Support AI Research and Development summarizing lessons learned from Federal agencies on the use of cloud computing to further AI R&D. The report came about from another Federal Government’s Select Committee […]