This is a guest post, written by David W. McDonald, Chair and Associate Professor in the Human Centered Design and Engineering Department at the University of Washington. Designing a good application is hard. Designing a good computer system is harder. Designing a good system that accounts for the vagaries of people, their motivations, and their flaws is even harder. Yet that is the challenge that designers of social computing systems must solve. The difficulties of designing social computing systems derive from both the complexity of the software and hardware configurations, and the fact that some participants in a social computing system will not behave with positive goals or intent. That […]

Mahsa Mirzargar, Ph.D. and Lace Padilla from the University of Utah contributed to this post. The Computing Community Consortium’s (CCC) Uncertainty in Computation Visioning Workshop was held in Washington DC in mid October, led by Bill Thompson and Ross Whitaker from the University of Utah. The workshop brought together over 40 scientists from different disciplines including simulation and data science, engineering, statistics, applied mathematics, visualization, decision science and psychology. The overarching goal of the workshop was to open a discussion between experts with diverse scientific backgrounds about the topic of uncertainty/risk and its communication. The attendees worked to articulate grand research challenges in understanding and communicating uncertainty inherent in computational processes […]

The following is a guest blog post by CCC Council Member Shashi Shekhar, McKnight Distinguished University Professor Department of Computer Science College of Science and Engineering University of Minnesota. Cyber-Earth, a web-based geo-referenced representation of our changing planet, is a powerful tool for communication among citizens, policy makers, and scientists. In the last decade, billions have enjoyed Google Earth, which provides geo-imagery describing a recent state of the entire planet. It is a scalable tool to share geo-imagery (e.g., aftermath of Hurricane Katarina) with citizens and policy makers. It also allows citizens to contribute geo-spatial information to improve map quality and coverage as envisaged in the 1998 speech by Vice President Al Gore on […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) issued a new call for proposals for workshops that will catalyze and enable innovative research at the frontiers of computing.  The CCC encourages creative ideas from all segments of the computing research community on topics ranging from the formulation of new basic research to the use of existing research ideas and technologies to address important scientific or societal challenges. From the solicitation: Workshop organizers are expected to bring together a group of scientists and practitioners in the area of interest, and to formulate a program that encourages new ideas, innovative thinking, and broad discussion. Workshops can be of varying sizes, typically ranging from 20 to 100 participants.  It is important that […]

The following is a guest post by Margo Seltzer, Herchel Smith Professor of Computer Science at Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Science. Her collaborators were Regina Herzlinger of Harvard Business School and Kevin Schulman of Duke University School of Medicine.  A computer scientist, doctor, and business professor all walked into a MOOC… Well, not exactly, but it is not far off from the HarvardX MOOC on healthcare innovation organized by Regina Herzlinger of Harvard Business School and featuring domain experts such as Dr. Kevin Schulman of Duke and me. Called “Innovating in Healthcare,” our goal was to engage participants in “evaluating opportunities and the elements of viable business models for […]

Periodically the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) will highlight former CI Fellows to showcase their current research. The following was submitted by Dr. Ioan Raicu.  Former Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Computing Innovation Fellow (CI Fellow), Dr. Ioan Raicu, now an Assistant Professor in Computer Science at Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) and a research faculty member in the Math and Computer Science Division at Argonne National Laboratory, focuses on the relatively new distributed systems paradigm called Many-Task Computing (MTC). MTC aims to bridge the gap between two predominant paradigms, namely High-Throughput Computing (HTC) and High-Performance Computing (HPC). His work has focused on defining and exploring both the theory and practical aspects of realizing […]