Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council Member Jennifer Rexford has been named the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) 2016-2017 Athena Lecturer. Each year, the Athena Lecturer award celebrates women researchers who have made fundamental contributions to computer science. Rexford is the Gordon Y. S. Wu Professor in Engineering in the Department of Computer Science at Princeton University. She has been cited for innovations that improved the efficiency of the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) in routing Internet traffic, for laying the groundwork for software-defined networks (SDNs) and for contributions in measuring and engineering IP networks. These contributions greatly enhanced the stability and flow of Internet transmissions, and make data networks easier to design, understand and manage. […]

The Computing Research Association (CRA), in consultation with the National Science Foundation (NSF), has appointed four new members to the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council: Sampath Kannan, University of Pennsylvania Maja Mataric, University of Southern California Nina Mishra, Amazon Research Holly Rushmeier, Yale University Beginning July 1, the new members will each serve three-year terms. The CCC Council is comprised of 20 members who have expertise in diverse areas of computing. They are instrumental in leading CCC’s visioning programs, which help create and enable visions for future computing research. Members serve staggered three-year terms that rotate every July. The CCC and CRA thank those Council members whose terms end on June 30 for their exceptional dedication and […]

The following Great Innovative Idea is from Francesca Rossi from the University of Padova. Rossi and her colleagues Joshua Greene (Harvard University), John Tasioulas (King’s College London), Kristen Brent Venable (Tulane University), and Brian Williams (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) published a paper called Embedding Ethical Principles in Collective Decision Support Systems which was one of the winners at the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) sponsored Blue Sky Ideas Track Competition 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 Innovative Idea We intend to model both ethical principles and safety constraints in (collective) decision making systems. We believe that current AI frameworks to model and reason with preferences, as well as risk-bound reasoning […]

The following is a guest blog post from Ed Lazowska, Bill & Melinda Gates Chair in Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington and Founding Chair of the Computing Community Consortium (2007-2013).  The 2016 U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) job projections have recently been released, covering the decade 2014-2024. As in all recent BLS projections, computing occupations dominate STEM: computing occupations are projected to account for 73% of all newly-created STEM jobs during the decade (488,500 jobs), and 55% of all available STEM jobs, whether newly-created or available due to retirements (1,083,800 jobs over the decade). Of course, there are asterisks associated with any projection. And there are double asterisks associated […]

Contributions to this post were made by Elizabeth Mynatt, CCC Vice Chair and Executive Director of the Institute for People and Technology at Georgia Tech. Dr. Mynatt was a member of the President’s Council of Advisors for Science and Technology (PCAST) working group on aging and technology and led the Computing Community Consortium’s (CCC) Aging in Place workshop. Recently, the New York Times published an article on A Push for Less Expensive Hearing Aids. The article highlighted the findings in a recent PCAST report on aging and technology. The report stated that almost two-thirds of Americans over the age of 70 have some kind of hearing loss, however many of them […]

The following Great Innovative Idea is from David H. Ackley from the University of New Mexico. His Indefinite Scalability for Living Computation paper was one of the winners at the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) sponsored Blue Sky Ideas Track Competition 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 Innovative Idea Traditional digital computers employ hardware determinism, meaning that running a program twice on the same inputs is guaranteed to produce the same outputs. Determinism greatly simplifies programming the machine, but ultimately limits its size—and encourages the development of software that is highly efficient, but also extremely fragile, and all but impossible to keep secure. The blue sky idea is […]