The CCC-sponsored robotics initiative kicks off next week with the first of four workshops covering the impact, applications and emerging technologies of robotics. Robotics research and development have already transformed our lives in many ways: they perform nearly all the welding and painting on the cars we drive; they enable telerobotic surgery resulting in more reliable outcomes and faster recovery times; they perform millions of scientific experiments and observations in chemistry, biology and medical labs.  Increasingly robotics is also providing improved control and functionality in people’s daily lives: some new model cars can park themselves or provide advanced distance-keeping cruise control and collision warnings; millions of autonomous vacuum cleaners are […]

Welcome to the weblog for the Computing Community Consortium! In its founding documents, the CCC describes its goals as follows: The challenge for the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is to catalyze the computing research community to debate longer range, more audacious research challenges; to build consensus around research visions; to evolve the most promising visions toward clearly defined initiatives; and to work with the funding organizations to move challenges and visions toward funding initiatives. All great goals. But how do we set about accomplishing them? While it is still early days for the CCC, a number of very interesting proposals for “visioning” have already been generated by the research community, […]