The following blog was written by Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Chair Mark D. Hill from the University of Wisconsin Madison. Due to technology challenges and potential societal benefits, NSF has provided sustained funding for issues surrounding effective scaling of parallel and distributed computing, including through the Exploiting Parallelism and Scalability (XPS) Program, begun in 2012, and the Scalable Parallelism in the Extreme (SPX) Program, started in 2016. To illuminate directions in this area, NSF commissioned a workshop held in June 2019 as part of the Federated Computing Research Conference and led by Michael Carbin of MIT and Scott D. Stoller of Stony Brook University. The workshop report was recently issued. […]

The following is a letter to the community from Erwin Gianchandani, Acting Assistant Director, of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Directorate of Computer & Information Science & Engineering (CISE).  Dear Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Community, I am delighted to announce the appointment of Dr. Gurdip Singh as the division director (DD) for the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Division of Computer and Network Systems (CNS), effective March 2, 2020. Gurdip will be joining NSF/CISE from Syracuse University, where he is currently Professor of Computer Science and Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Programs. Prior to joining the Syracuse faculty in 2016, he served as a program director in CNS in 2014-2016, […]

The National Science Foundation (NSF) just posted a number of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) about the National Artificial Intelligence (AI) Research Institutes: Accelerating Research, Transforming Society, and Growing the American Workforce Solicitation (NSF 20-503). The National Artificial Intelligence Research Institutes program anticipates approximately $120 million in grants next year to fund eight planning grants and up to six research institutes in order to advance AI research and create national nexus points for universities, federal agencies, industries, and nonprofits. Earlier this year, the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) released their completed AI Roadmap, titled A 20-Year Community Roadmap for AI Research in the US. An HTML version is available here. This roadmap, led by Yolanda Gil (University […]

John Hennessy, Chair of Alphabet Inc., will present “The End of Moore’s Law and Faster General-Purpose Processors, and a New Road Forward,” part of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Computer & Information Science & Engineering (CISE) Distinguished Lecture Series on November 22nd, 2019, from 1:00PM to 2:00PM ET. John Hennessy revolutionized the design of computer processors with the invention of the RISC architecture, which increased performance while reducing costs.  He co-founded MIPS Computer System in 1984 and went on to pioneering research in distributed systems.  He served as President of Stanford University from 2000 to 2016, and in 2017 received ACM A.M. Turing Award together with his collaborator David Patterson.  In 2018, he was named […]

We live in a new world. A world where information can spread fast and without any regard to accuracy. Our challenge as individual citizens is to somehow identify the disinformation from the actual information. Kate Starbird and her team from the University of Washington spend time studying this problem and the impact disinformation can have on society. Starbird recently gave a keynote address at the National Science Foundation 2019 Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace Principal Investigator’s Meeting (SaTC PI meeting ’19) in Alexandria, VA on “Bots and Trolls” — Understanding Disinformation as Collaborative Work. As Starbird said in her talk: Disinformation is not simply false information or just about “bots” or […]

The National Science Foundation’s (NSF) new solicitation, titled National Artificial Intelligence (AI) Research Institutes: Accelerating Research, Transforming Society, and Growing the American Workforce, has a program webinar on November 7th, 2019 at 3:30-4:30 PM ET. Artificial Intelligence (AI) has advanced tremendously and today promises personalized healthcare; enhanced national security; improved transportation; and more effective education, to name just a few benefits. Increased computing power, the availability of large datasets and streaming data, and algorithmic advances in machine learning (ML) have made it possible for AI development to create new sectors of the economy and revitalize industries. Continued advancement, enabled by sustained federal investment and channeled toward issues of national importance, holds the […]