The Computing Research Association seeks a highly motivated individual to serve as a Deputy Director for the Computing Community Consortium. The Deputy Director works with the CCC Director, Council Members, and the CRA staff to ensure that the CCC succeeds in its mission: to serve as a catalyst and enabler for the computing research community, to provide mechanisms for the community to identify compelling research visions for the future of the field and to articulate those visions to key stakeholders. The Deputy Director provides backup to the Director in order to ensure that the CCC functions smoothly and effectively, and meets all of its contractual requirements in a timely and high-quality fashion. This […]

The 6th annual Heidelberg Laureate Forum ended with a tour, reception, and lovely dinner at Heidelberg Castle. It was a time for reflection and celebration for an amazing once-in-a-lifetime week for the students. As a journalist, it was fascinating for me to watch the students grow more confident as the week went on. By Friday, they were able to go up to the laureates and strike up a conversation about their work, Heidelberg, or even the dessert that we were eating. The laureates themselves really felt like they knew the students, sometimes referring to them by their first name in the hallway. This is what the HLF does so well. […]

The 2017 Turing Award winner, Dave Patterson, from the University of California, Berkeley, presented on Thursday morning of the HLF a talk called “The Past is Prologue: A New Golden Age for Computer Architecture.” He went through the fascinating history of computer architecture. While a lot has already been accomplished, there are new discoveries waiting to be made for the next generation of computer architects.

On Wednesday afternoon, HLF got out of the lecture halls and cruised down the Neckar River. I decided to spend my time listening in on conversations and jumping in when I could by asking “what do you think is going to be the most exciting thing in computing in the next 10 years?” I thought I would get a consensus or at least have duplicated answers, but after talking to a number of different students none of their answers were the same. In fact, some of them didn’t even say that their research would be the most exciting thing in computing in ten years (although a few of them did- […]

Only day two of the Heidelberg Laureate Forum and the term machine learning or “ML” has been popping up throughout talks and in conversations with young researchers and the laureates. Machine learning uses statistical techniques to give computers the ability to learn without them having to be explicitly programmed. The goal is for a program to learn by itself without any human intervention. In a discussion with Jeffrey A. Dean, the winner of ACM’s 2012 Prize in Computing and the current head of Google’s AI Division, he repeatedly mentioned and stressed the importance of machine learning. Google AI currently has an open source machine learning platform called TensorFlow which Dean said […]

Is your 2-year-old smarter than your computer? Yes, simply because she is human. While she might not know how to read or do simple addition, she has the uniquely human ability to rationalize. She can take a small piece of information and abstract it. That is what makes her smarter than a computer. And that is what we need to train computers to do. This was one of the big topics of discussion on the first day of the 6th Heidelberg Laureate Forum. John E. Hopcroft, from Cornell University, presented a talked called “An Introduction to AI and Deep Learning.” Hopcroft started with a simple example. He recalls reading a […]