Significant contributions to this post were provided by CCC Senior Program Associate, Khari Douglas.  The Marconi Society, a nonprofit chaired by Vint Cerf and dedicated to bridging the digital divide, held a virtual symposium on Friday, October 22nd, to celebrate the newest Marconi Fellow Andrea Goldsmith.  Friday’s symposium was really a call to action for the computing, and specifically networking, community. The three keynote speakers Doreen Bogdan-Martin (International Telecommunications Union), Jessica Rosenworcel (Federal Communications Commission), and Andrea Goldsmith (Princeton University) all made the case for the urgent, pressing need for expanding access to connectivity.  In her keynote, Bogdan-Martin stated that 3.7 billion people still have no online connectivity, which is […]

Former Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council member and Professor of Computer Science &  Engineering and Electrical & Computer Engineering at the University of Washington, Shwetak Patel, was just anointed to the Georgia Tech College of Computing’s Hall of Fame and Business Insider’s list of “30 leaders under 40” who are changing healthcare. He is being recognized for a broad scope of work ranging from home energy monitoring (Zensi) to a mobile health company (Senosis Health). Along with being a professor and head of Ubicomp Lab, Patel holds the Washington Research Foundation Entrepreneurship Endowed Professorship; is the Director of health technologies at Google Health and FitBit Research; was the recipient of […]

Last year the IEEE announced the creation of the IEEE Frances E Allen medal, recognizing the contributions of Frances “Fran” E. Allen as an American computer scientist and pioneer in the field of optimizing compilers. Allen spent her entire career at IBM, beginning in 1957 by teaching new employees the fundamentals of Fortran and continuing until her retirement in 2002. From 1980 to 1995, Allen led IBM’s work in the developing parallel computing area, and helped to develop software for the IBM Blue Gene project. Among her many awards, Allen was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1987, she became the first female IBM Fellow in 1989, and in 2006 became […]

The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) has elected 120 new members- including a record number of women- and 30 foreign members. Five computing researchers are among those elected this year. They include Gilles Brassard (Université de Montréal), Michael Kearns (University of Pennsylvania), Anna Karlin (University of Washington), Yann LeCun (New York University), and Linda Petzold (University of California, Santa Barbara). Michael Kearns has participated in many Computing Community Consortium (CCC) workshops including Theoretical Foundations for Social Computing in 2015 and Fair Representations and Fair Interactive Learning in 2018. Anna Karlin is a former CRA-Widening Participation (CRA-EP) Board Member. She has been active in several CRA-WP activities including Grad Cohort, Virtual […]

The NSF Convergence Accelerator issued a new funding opportunity (NSF-21-572) focused on two research track topics; the Networked Blue Economy and Trust & Authenticity in Communication Systems.  Launched in 2019, the NSF Convergence Accelerator brings together multiple disciplines, expertise, and cross-cutting partnerships to develop solutions through a convergence research approach and innovation processes. The Trust & Authenticity in Communication Systems (Track F) might be particularly interesting for our research community.  “Modern life is dependent on access to communications systems that offer trustworthy and accurate information. Economic growth and opportunity depend on dynamic innovation and transaction networks to connect American families, communities, and businesses to a range of goods and services […]

The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters recently announced the award of the 2021 Abel Prize going to matematician László Lovász (Alfréd Rényi Institute of Mathematics and Eötvös Loránd University) and computer scientist Avi Wigderson (Princeton University) “for their foundational contributions to theoretical computer science and discrete mathematics, and their leading role in shaping them into central fields of modern mathematics.”   Starting in 2003, the Abel Prize is a distinguished award given to members of the scientific community to recognize outstanding work and contributions to the field of mathematics. Nominations are reviewed by the ‘Abel Committee’ consisting of five mathematicians to determine a winner. Lovász and Wigderson’s award-winning work […]