Your faithful correspondent recently attended the paired ACM-BCS Visions of Computer Science 2010 and UKCRC Grand Challenges conferences at Edinburgh University.  (Due to volcanic ash and the resulting travel snarls, this correspondent’s stay in the UK has been extended longer than expected!) The Visions conference was designed to highlight research visions for the future and consisted of invited plenaries and submitted talks. The plenaries were extremely well done.  Ross Anderson spoke about the integration of social issues and computing in the design of increasingly complex systems, using numerous examples from history and economic theory. Nicolò Cesa-Bianchi explored frontiers in machine learning, Jon Kleinberg spoke about the future of social networks, […]

Your faithful correspondent recently participated in the European Computer Science Summit 2009, the annual meeting of Informatics Europe (Paris, 8-9 October; http://www.informatics-europe.org/). Informatics Europe was created five years ago as a European version of CRA (which is a North American association by charter). A recurring theme at this meeting was the concern that the European scientific research community still does not fully appreciate computing as an intellectually vibrant research discipline in its own right; instead the field is often viewed as an enabler of research in other disciplines. A number of discussions centered on ways in which the computing community can do a better job in explaining the field to […]