The White House has released the list awardees of the Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE). The PECASE awards were established by President Clinton in 1996 and are coordinated by the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). Featuring 102 scientists and researchers, the list of recipients spans across government agencies, from the Department of Commerce to the National Science Foundation (NSF), and celebrate their pursuit of innovative research in science and technology and commitment to community service. Of the accomplished awardees there a number applying their computing backgrounds to related research in government agencies. Some highlights are: Emily Fox, University of Washington, “for her groundbreaking work […]

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has announced giving $10 million in awards to 10 “Big Data Spokes” projects in order to facilitate research on topics identified by the four Big Data Regional Innovation Hubs (BD Hubs). The BD Hubs, started by NSF last year, attempt to address regional specific needs for big data. For instance the Midwest Hub includes a focus on agriculture, while the South Hub includes coastal hazards. The Spokes cover a range of topics, including agriculture, data sharing, healthcare, and big data for environmental uses. “The BD Spokes advance the goals and regional priorities of each BD Hub, fusing the strengths of a range of institutions and […]

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is offering up to $40,000 to two communities as part of their Smart City Air Challenge in order to help the communities create and implement plans to deploy air quality sensors and share the subsequent data. To qualify, communities will need to submit their plans detailing how they will deploy hundreds of air quality sensors and how they will manage the data they collect. The award money will not cover the entire program costs – communities will need to partner with sensor manufactures, data management companies, and other necessary industry partners in order to fully realize their plans. After a year the EPA will evaluate […]

The MacArthur Foundation has announced its 2016 MacArthur Fellows, a list that features 23 individuals who “are breaking new ground in areas of public concern, in the arts, and in the sciences.” The Fellowship grants each recipient $625,000 in order to pursue their interests for the benefit of human society. This year’s list includes two computer scientists – Subhash Khot, professor at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at NYU and Bill Thies, Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research India. Professor Khot is a theoretical computer scientist who is focuses his research on the limits of computing, in particular the study of the Unique Games Conjecture (UGC), which postulates that the […]

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 Computing Community Consortium (CCC) recently sponsored a Blue Sky Ideas Conference Track at the 30th Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-16), February 12-17, 2016 in Phoenix, Arizona. The purpose of this conference was to promote research in artificial intelligence (AI) and scientific exchange among AI researchers, practitioners, scientists, and engineers in affiliated disciplines. The goal of this track was to present ideas and visions that can stimulate the research community to pursue new directions, such as new problems, new application domains, or new methodologies. CCC Chair Greg Hager presented the awards to the three winning papers. Indefinite Scalability for Living Computation David H. Ackley (University of New Mexico) * To watch a video […]