Daily headlines bemoan the lack of secure systems and this past year witnessed numerous breaches leading to the disclosure of private information. The failure of these commercial systems has dominated much of the discourse around security and privacy. However, the secure collection and transmission of information and the judicious use of private data is fundamental to the core of our society beyond commerce. It underlies the basic processes of governance and civic participation. Almost a decade ago, computing researchers developed a mathematical theory called differential privacy, which protects information about individuals when analyzing groups of people. Differential privacy is now deployed in the commercial space and used by US federal […]

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 2018 NAACL Student Research Workshop (SRW) will be held in conjunction with NAACL HLT 2018 in New Orleans, Louisiana on June 1-6th, 2018. The SRW gives student researchers in Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing (NLP) the opportunity to present their work and receive constructive feedback and mentorship by experienced members of the Association for Computational Linguistics community. General Invitation for Submission The SRW provides a venue for student researchers to present their work in computational linguistics and natural language processing. Students receive feedback from the general conference audience as well as from mentors specifically assigned according to the topic of their work. SRW is especially focused on supporting undergraduate students […]

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) has released its 2018 list of newly elevated fellows. The IEEE Grade of Fellow is given to a IEEE member with an extraordinary record of accomplishments in any of the IEEE fields of interest by the Board of Directors. This year’s list features a number of impressive computer scientists, including Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council members Jennifer Rexford, Princeton University, for contributions to network management and associated routing systems and Kevin Fu, University of Michigan, for contributions to embedded and medical device security. Congratulations to all the recipients for their accomplishments! To learn more about the IEEE Fellows and to view fellows from previous years visit the IEEE Fellows webpage.

While wearable computing might seem like a new thing, it has been a part of our imagination since 1945 when Vannevar Bush headed the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development and envisioned the head-mounted camera that a scientist could wear while doing experiments. This example and others were given by plenary speaker and Contextual Computing Group Professor Thad Starner from Georgia Tech at the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Symposium on Computing Research: Addressing National Priorities and Societal Needs. Microdisplays, networking, and sensing all came together in 2010 and suddenly the field of wearable computing was no longer imaginary but real. The CCC Symposium was held on October 23-24, 2017 in Washington, […]

The following blog post was drafted by CCC Chair Beth Mynatt, CCC Exec Member Ben Zorn, and CCC Council Members Elizabeth Bradley, Sampath Kannan, and Cynthia Dwork. Beth Mynatt, CCC Chair, recently submitted the following letter to the Editor of the New York Times: In her November 14th Op-Ed, Cathy O’Neil makes the case that technology is impacting people’s lives at an accelerating pace and that computer scientists have been “asleep at the wheel” in dealing with emerging challenges. Computing research advances have had sweeping societal effects, but not without problems (e.g. racial bias in facial recognition). Careful design is critical to heading off “unintended consequences” resulting from one-sided research […]