This month marks the 35th anniversary of the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Directorate. CISE was founded on May 1, 1986, and it continues to support “investigator-initiated research and education in all areas of computer and information science and engineering,” including the Computing Community Consortium (CCC), which CISE funds through a cooperative agreement with the Computing Research Association.  Highlighted in their May newsletter, “One of CISE’s key early investments in information technology was the Digital Libraries Initiative (DLI). This initiative provided global, multilingual repositories of data, knowledge, sound, and images. Through the DLI, NSF supported a project that would ultimately result in the creation of Google.”    The National […]

Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council member William “Bill” Gropp has been voted IEEE Computer Society 2021 president-elect and will serve as president in 2022! The IEEE Computer Society is the world’s home for computer science, engineering, and technology. A global leader in providing access to computer science research, analysis, and information, the IEEE Computer Society offers a comprehensive array of unmatched products, services, and opportunities for individuals at all stages of their professional career. Gropp is the director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and the Thomas M. Siebel Chair in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Read the full news release from the society. Congrats, Bill!

On day two of the Virtual Heidelberg Laureate Forum (HLF) 2020, Robert Endre Tarjan and Donald Ervin Knuth engaged in a freewheeling conversation about mathematics, computer science, and art. Donald Knuth was the 1974 ACM A.M. Turing Award winner for “for his major contributions to the analysis of algorithms and the design of programming languages, and in particular for his contributions to the ‘art of computer programming’ through his well-known books in a continuous series by this title.” Robert Tarjan won the Nevanlinna Prize in 1982 “for devising near-optimal algorithms for many graph-theoretic and geometric problems for the development and exploitation of data structures supporting efficient algorithms, and for contributing several algorithmic analyses of striking profundity […]

The following preamble is from Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Chair Mark D. Hill from the University of Wisconsin Madison.  Over the last century, computer systems have been implemented with many technologies that evolve and are occasionally replaced by successors, e.g., discrete transistors with integrated circuits and ferrite core memory with DRAM. Heretofore, these technology transitions have been within—not between—the categories of computing, communication, memory, and storage. Below Steve Swanson reports on a new Intel technology that combines the categories of volatile memory and non-volatile storage in his recent ACM SIGARCH Blog. While we may just use “3DXPoint” conventionally–as separate memory or storage—it has the potential to merge memory and storage for systems […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is launching the “Catalyzing Computing” podcast, which will focus on topics of interest within the computing research community. The podcast is hosted by CCC Program Associate Khari Douglas and will feature interviews with researchers and policy makers about their background and experiences in the computing community. The podcast will also offer recaps of visioning workshops and other events hosted by the CCC. If you want to learn about some of the computing community’s most influential members or keep tabs on the latest areas of interest then, this is the podcast for you! The first episode of Catalyzing Computing features an interview of CCC Council Member Suresh […]

National Academy of Sciences’ Sackler Colloquium on Creativity and Collaboration: Revisiting Cybernetic Serendipity will be in Washington, DC at the National Academy of Sciences (2101 Constitution Avenue, NW Washington, District of Columbia 20418) on March 13-14, 2018. Our ambition is to redirect the history of ideas, restoring the Leonardo-like close linkage between art/design and science/engineering. We believe that internet-enabled collaborations can make more people more creative more of the time. 50 years ago in an era of political turmoil, the artistic response was captured in a famed exhibit on Cybernetic Serendipity that celebrated how individual artists could creatively transform computers into art machines. The rock star artists entranced 40,000 viewers with never-before seen images, […]