The following is a special contribution to this blog from the organizing committee of the Computing Community Consortium’s (CCC) visioning workshop on spatial computing — From GPS and Virtual Globes to Spatial Computing-2020 — held last Monday and Tuesday in Washington, DC. The committee summarizes some of the highlights of the workshop. Spatial computing (SC) is a set of ideas and technologies that will transform our lives by understanding the physical world, knowing and communicating our relation to places in that world, and navigating through those places. The transformational potential of spatial computing is already evident. From virtual maps to consumer GPS devices, our society has benefitted immensely from spatial technology. We’ve reached the point […]

Every week for the last several years, the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) has showcased an interesting computing (or related) research project as a “Highlight of the Week.” Today, in an effort to build upon the success of the Highlight feature, we are announcing an expanded version of this series called “Computing Research in Action.”

The Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) Office of National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) — which in fall 2009 launched the Strategic Health IT Advanced Research Projects (SHARP) Program, providing funding to four teams pursuing research to generate new knowledge and innovations enabling “the meaningful use of health IT and a high-performing, adaptive, nationwide health care system” — is out with an interesting video (after the jump) describing what advances in computing mean for the healthcare system of the future. The video, accompanied by a new web portal, HealthIT.gov, touches on some of the themes captured by the Computing Community Consortium’s (CCC) October 2009 workshop on discovery […]

“On the Edge — The Future of Computing Research” was the title of a plenary session at the Computing Research Association’s (CRA) biennial Conference at Snowbird last month. And it’s a consistent theme of CRA’s Computing Community Consortium (CCC). Here’s the pitch: Our field has exhibited an ever-changing balance of “technology push” and “demand pull” over the years. Many currently sense a movement of the pendulum in the “demand pull” direction. I’d like to argue that this is fantastic — it’s great news for our field, great news for society, and great news for the future (read more following the link…).

In an article published on The New York Times’ website this afternoon, the newspaper’s technology writer Steve Lohr describes the history and evolution of “Big Data” — noting it’s “been a crossover year for Big Data — as a concept, as a term and yes, as a marketing tool. Big Data has sprung from the confines of technology circles into the mainstream.” In the writeup, Lohr notes the role of white papers produced by the Computing Community Consortium (CCC):

In cooperation with the International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS), the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is pleased to invite submissions to a Challenges and Visions Track at AAMAS 2013, to be held in St. Paul, Minnesota, May 6-10, 2013. The emphasis of this track is on visionary ideas, long-term challenges, and new research opportunities that are outside the current mainstream of the field. In this way, this track will serve as an incubator for innovative approaches, risky and provocative ideas, and to propose challenges and opportunities for the field in the near future.