For weeks we have been recapping the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Symposium from the perspective of the researchers and industry representatives who presented their work on each panel. This week, we are getting a different perspective. The goal of the final panel, called Connecting Computing Research with National Priorities and moderated by CCC Vice Chair Mark D. Hill, was to get a perspective from people who have or are currently serving in government. The panelists included: Will Barkis, from Orange Silicon Valley, shared a Silicon Valley perspective and called for increasing investment in basic research and development to benefit society as well as support innovation in industry. He emphasized that collaboration […]

The terms superposition, entanglement, and interference might sound like they are from a superhero movie, but they are in fact very important terms in the field of quantum computing. Quantum computing is very different from classical digital on/off computing, which you might be more familiar with. It relies on the principles of quantum mechanics to compute and uses these terms to store information in a quantum state. Recently, the Microsoft Research Podcast interviewed Microsoft Principal Research Manager, Dr. Krysta Svore about her field of quantum computing. In the podcast, Svore talks about how quantum computing can do so much more than digital computing. With quantum algorithms we can “solve real […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is charged with catalyzing and empowering the U.S. computing research community to articulate and advance major research directions for the field. To do so, the CCC needs truly visionary leaders — people with great ideas, sound judgment, and the willingness to work hard to see things to completion. Please help the computing community by nominating such people for the Council. Established in 2006 through a cooperative agreement between the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Computing Research Association (CRA) — representing over 220 North American academic departments, industrial research labs, and professional societies with computing research interests, the CCC provides a voice for the national computing research community, and facilitates the […]

The following Great Innovative Idea is from Jaime Fernandez Fisac, a Ph.D. Candidate in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences Department at the University of California, Berkeley, in the area of Control, Intelligent Systems and Robotics. Fisac was one of the Blue Sky Award winners at the International Symposium on Robotics Research (ISRR 17) in Puerto Varas, Chile for his paper, Pragmatic-Pedagogic Value Alignment. The Idea Advances in robotics and AI are making robots increasingly capable and autonomous, but how will we ensure they understand what things they should or should not do? Our insight is that a competent robot collaborator should behave like a keen apprentice: humans are naturally skilled at social collaboration, and robots can exploit this fact to tap into […]

The following blog was written by CCC Vice Chair Mark D. Hill from the University of Wisconsin and CCC Cybersecurity Task Force Chair Kevin Fu from the University of Michigan. In recent days, several sources—listed below—have reported on two security design flaws in computer hardware that involve undesirable interactions between processor speculative execution and memory protection, but whose implications are still emerging. With speculative execution, a processor core uses heuristics to guess the next step for execution. Programs execute faster when the guess is correct. When speculation picks an incorrect direction, a core should hide any learned information from user-level software. With these newly disclosed flaws, incorrect outcomes from speculation […]

Contributions to this post were provided by CCC Exec member Ben Zorn.  Do you worry that the Bluetooth-enabled smart fork you just got for Christmas is trying to steal your password? Do you wonder what software was used to implement your smart fork and when it was last updated? These are questions we’ve never had to ask until now. Microsoft Research Podcast recently interviewed Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Executive Council member and CCC Intelligent Infrastructure (II) Task Force Co-Chair Ben Zorn, from Microsoft Research, on programming languages and how they are impacting the world. In the Podcast, Zorn talked about the Internet of Things. When we embed computing into infrastructure, […]