The following is a special contribution to this blog by Jenn Wortman Vaughan, a senior researcher at Microsoft Research.   Social computing encompasses the mechanisms through which people interact with computational systems like crowdsourcing markets, ranking and recommendation systems, online prediction markets, citizen science projects, and collaboratively edited wikis. Humans are active participants in these systems, making choices that determine the systems’ input, and therefore output. The output of these systems can be viewed as a joint computation between humans and machines, and can be richer than what either could produce alone. Social computing is blossoming into a rich research area, with contributions from diverse disciplines including computer science, economics, […]

This week (September 21-25) is the sixth annual National Postdoc Appreciation Week (NPAW), sponsored by the National Postdoctoral Association (NPA). NPAW, the nation’s largest celebration of postdoctoral scholars, was established with the goal of increasing awareness of postdocs. Institutions are encouraged to plan activities that honor postdocs and recognize the contributions they make to research and development in the United States. The Postdoc Best Practices (Postdoc BP) program is coming into its second year. This project is a joint effort of the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) and the National Science Foundation (NSF), designed to create a set of best practices for postdoctoral researchers (postdocs) in computer science. The Postdocs BP […]

The CCC Computer-Aided Personalized Education (CAPE) Workshop will be held in Washington, DC on November 12-13th. The demand for education in STEM fields is exploding, and universities and colleges are straining to satisfy this demand. In the case of Computer Science, for example, the number of US students enrolled in introductory courses has grown three-fold in the past decade. Recently massive open online courses (MOOCs) have been promoted as a way to ease this strain, but scaling traditional models of teaching to MOOCs poses many of the same challenges observed in the overflowing classrooms, namely, assessment of students’ knowledge and providing meaningful feedback to individual students. To tackle these problems […]

The following Great Innovative Idea is from Marc Palyart at the University of British Columbia, Gail C. Murphy at the Univeristy of British Columbia, Emerson Murphy-Hill at NC State University, and Xavier Blanc at Bordeaux University. Their Speculative Reprogramming paper won third 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 Software programming today is largely a flat-line activity.  Although a software developer implementing a design makes many choices, such as which library to use, which data structures to use and so on, these choices are seldom captured; the code committed to the repository is typically the final end choice. To support programming as […]

In May, the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) commissioned members of the research community to generate white papers to help guide strategic thinking in autonomous systems in a number of different domain specific areas, including Aerial Earth Science, Construction, Defense, Disaster Management, Healthcare, Paths Towards Autonomy, Service Robots, and Transportation Systems. The CCC has released eight white papers. The Toward a Science of Autonomy for Physical Systems white paper frames both the opportunities and challenges posed by autonomous physical systems in general. We contend that, in most cases, the potential human and economic toll of not exploring and understanding automation science in a timely and thoughtful manner far outweighs the costs or risks. The associated […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is releasing its fifth segment in the Computing Research in Action Series.  Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison are engaging in a very exciting interdisciplinary activity between computer science and medicine. Professor Eftychios Sifakis, collaborating with Dr. Court Cutting and Dr. Timothy King, has built a computer aided platform that allows surgeons in training to rehearse, plan, and experiment with surgical procedures before actually trying them out on a real patient. The research program is called the Skin Biophysics Surgical Simulator and is funded by the National Science Foundation‘s Smart and Connected Health initiative. My vision is that this product is going to improve the quality of patient care by offering the […]