Last week I shared my interview with Thermodynamic Computing workshop organizers, Tom Conte (Georgia Tech) and Todd Hylton (UC San Diego) and workshop participant Christof Teuscher in What is Thermodynamic Computing? Part 1. Part 2 of What is Thermodynamic Computing? is now available for streaming or download on Soundcloud (embed below), or you find it on iTunes | Spotify | Stitcher | Google Play. In this episode I interview workshop organizer, Natesh Ganesh, a PhD student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst who is interested in the physical limits to computing, brain inspired hardware, non-equilibrium thermodynamics, and emergence of intelligence in self-organized systems. He was awarded the best paper award at IEEE ICRC’17 for the paper  A Thermodynamic Treatment of Intelligent Systems. I also speak with workshop participant […]

A few weeks ago, I blogged about the Thermodynamic Computing workshop that took place in Honolulu between January 3-5. Today a new episode of the Catalyzing Computing podcast is available that features an interview with two of the workshop organizers, Tom Conte (Georgia Tech) and Todd Hylton (UC San Diego). In this interview we discuss their reasons for proposing the workshop, what thermodynamic computing is, and the potential impact that thermodynamic computing could have on future technology. I also sit down with workshop participant Christof Teuscher (Portland State University) to discuss his thoughts on the workshop and his work with new models of computation, including computing with DNA. You can stream or download the […]

The following blog was written by CCC Vice Chair Mark D. Hill, with contributions from Sarita Adve and Alvin Lebeck.  As readers of the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) blog know, CCC seeks to promote information technology research by exposing and developing synergies among researchers, research beneficiaries, and research funders. CCC does this through visioning activities, white papers, a blog, etc. CCC is pleased to see some of its efforts amplified by specific research communities, e.g., artificial intelligence. Here I highlight my own computer architecture community to encourage you to emulate this amplification in your community. Over the years, CCC has conducted a number of visioning activities related to computer architecture including 2012’s 21st Century Computer Architecture, 2016’s Arch2030: A Vision of Computer Architecture […]

The mission of Computing Research Association’s (CRA) Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is to catalyze the computing research community and enable the pursuit of innovative, high-impact research. CCC conducts activities that strengthen the research community, articulate compelling research visions, and align those visions with pressing national and global challenges. CCC communicates the importance of those visions to policymakers, government and industry stakeholders, the public, and the research community itself. In accordance with the mission, CCC is issuing a new call for proposals for workshops that will catalyze and enable innovative research at the frontiers of computing. From the solicitation: Successful activities will articulate new research visions, galvanize community interest in those visions, mobilize support for those visions from the […]

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 […]

National Institutes of Health (NIH) funded researchers have more than doubled the knowledge of the functional areas of the human brain. NIH Director, Francis Collins, posted a Director’s Blog about a recent NIH funded study that was reported in the journal Nature, which brings the map of the human brain into much sharper focus. From the blog post: By combining multiple types of cutting-edge brain imaging data from more than 200 healthy young men and women, the researchers were able to subdivide the cerebral cortex, the brain’s outer layer, into 180 specific areas in each hemisphere. Remarkably, almost 100 of those areas had never before been described. This new high-resolution […]