The Kairos Society, a San Francisco-based international organization that supports the development of entrepreneurs has published its fourth annual list of Kairos 50; a list of 50 emerging global startups, with at least one founder under the age of 25. The list of 50 finalists was chosen from 550 nominations and one winner could get $50,000 from Ev Williams, one of Twitter’s co-founders. Some computing-related highlights of the finalists include: Adjuvo Motion, a Netherlands-based, health-tech company that offers monitoring systems and diagnostic tools for outpatient monitoring and a brace that can help patients undergoing therapy. Ava, a company that has developed an app that transcribes group conversations in real time to […]

The National Science Foundation (NSF) is pleased to accept nominations for the 2016 Alan T. Waterman Award. The Waterman Award is NSF’s highest honor. Each year, the Foundation bestows the award to recognize the talent, creativity, and influence of a singular young researcher. Congress established the Alan T. Waterman Award in August 1975 to mark the 25th Anniversary of the NSF and to honor its first Director. The annual award recognizes an outstanding young researcher in any field of science or engineering supported by the NSF. In addition to a medal, the awardee receives a grant of $1,000,000 over a five year period for scientific research or advanced study in the mathematical, physical, […]

The MacArthur Foundation has named its 2015 class of MacArthur Fellows, recognizing 24 exceptionally creative individuals with a track record of achievement and the potential for significant contributions in the future. Fellows will each receive a no-strings-attached stipend of $625,000, paid out over five years. The Fellowship comes with no stipulations or reporting requirements, and allows recipients maximum freedom to follow their own creative visions. One of the fellows is John Novembre, a computational biologist in the Department of Human Genetics at the University of Chicago, who is shedding new light on human evolutionary history, population structure and migration, and the etiology of genetic diseases. Another one of the fellows is Christopher Ré, […]

The Anita Borg Institute (ABI), a non-profit organization focused on the advancement of women in computing, has announced the winners of the 2015 Grace Hopper Celebration (GHC) ABIE Awards. Each year, the GHC ABIE Awards recognize female leaders in the categories of technical leadership, social impact, innovative teaching practices, emerging leadership and international change agent.   The winners are nominated by their peers and chosen by a panel of fellow technologists and past ABIE Award winners based on their extraordinary achievements and commitment to excellence. This year’s GHC ABIE Awards and their winners, respectively, are: Technical Leadership ABIE Award  The Technical Leadership ABIE Award recognizes women technologists who demonstrate leadership through their contributions […]

Every year the MIT Technology Review publishes a list of 35 innovators under the age of 35. They recently published the list for 2015. Of the 35 innovators, 13 are working on problems related to computer science. This list includes Travis Deyle who was a member of the Computing Community Consortium’s (CCC) CI Fellow program in 2011. He now works at the Google X research lab. He was part of the team that is working on glucose-measuring contact lenses. Some of the other computer scientists include Yevgen Borodin, the CEO of Charmtech Labs, who is developing software to help the blind listen to online content; Zakir Durumeric, a PhD student […]

The following Great Innovative Idea is from Sebastian Elbaum, Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and David S. Rosenblum, Dean of the School of Computing at the National University of Singapore. Their paper Known Unknowns: Testing in the Presence of Uncertainty won second place at the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) sponsored Blue Sky Ideas Conference Track series at the 22nd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE), November 16-22, 2014 in Hong Kong. The Innovative Idea Uncertainty is present in most systems we build today, whether introduced by human decisions, machine learning algorithms, external libraries, or sensing variability. This uncertainty leads to occasional misbehavior or incorrect output that is deemed to be acceptable. In the […]