Shwetak Patel, from the University of Washington, contributed to this post.  Would you like to know how much energy your living room TV is using when it is running? What about when how much it uses while still plugged in and turned “off”? How about checking to see if your newborn baby has jaundice using your smartphone? Would that be helpful? All these practical applications are now possible using a smart sensor in the home and on your phone. The National Science Foundation Science Nation recently went to the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) council member Shwetak Patel’s lab to learn how to use smart sensors to create a breakdown of […]

Recently, Bloomberg posted an opinion piece about data ethics. How do we as a community handle data ethically? We know that the amount of data created each day will only continue to increase. What does responsible data sharing and use look like ‒ for a data scientist, a parent, or a business? How are our socioeconomic structures and methods of interaction shaping behavior? How might we ensure that our technologies and practices are fair and unbiased?  These questions are only going to get harder to answer. One idea that is proposed in the article is to have a “Hippocratic Oath” for data scientists. “Just as medical professionals pledge to do no harm, individuals […]

The next WATCH talk, called Why the Census Bureau Adopted Differential Privacy for the 2020 Census of Population, from John M. Abowd, Chief Scientist and Associate Director for Research and Methodology at the U.S. Census Bureau, is Wednesday, June 6th 2018, Noon-1PM EST. Dr. Abowd was the lead author of the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) white paper on Privacy-Preserving Data Analysis for the Federal Statistical Agencies in January 2017.  John M. Abowd is Associate Director for Research and Methodology and Chief Scientist at the United States Census Bureau and the Edmund Ezra Day Professor of Economics, Professor of Statistics and Information Science at Cornell University. At the Census Bureau, he leads a directorate of research centers, each devoted […]

The following is a letter to the community from James Kurose, Assistant Director, and Erwin Gianchandani, Deputy Assistant Director, of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Directorate of Computer & Information Science & Engineering (CISE).  Dear CISE Community, The NSF Directorate of Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) is delighted to announce the appointment of Dr. Henry Kautz as the Division Director for our Division of Information and Intelligent Systems (IIS),  effective June 11, 2018. Henry will be joining NSF/CISE from the University of Rochester, where he is a professor and the founding director of the Goergen Institute for Data Science. Previously, he was chair of the computer science department at the University of Rochester; professor […]

The National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) has announced that IBM has joined as one of the cloud resource providers for the Critical Techniques, Technologies, and Methodologies for Advancing Foundations and Applications of Big Data Sciences and Engineering (BIGDATA) program solicitation in Fiscal Year (FY) 2018. From the news update: IBM joins Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Microsoft Azure in providing cloud credits/resources to qualifying NSF-funded projects, thereby supporting researchers in their big data research and education activities, especially those focusing on large-scale experimentation and scalability studies. Following the introduction and success of the cloud option last year, CISE issued a call to encourage participation by […]

The next WATCH talk, called The Hidden Multi-Billion Dollar International Trade in Our Medical Data, from Adam Tanner, Author of “Our Bodies, Our Data:  How Companies Make Billions Selling Our Medical Records,” is Tuesday, May 1st 2018, Noon-1PM EST. Adam Tanner is a leading expert on the business of personal data and privacy. He is the author of Our Bodies, Our Data: How Companies Make Billions Selling Our Medical Records (2017) and What Stays in Vegas: The World of Personal Data – Lifeblood of Big Business – and the End of Privacy as We Know It.  He is an associate at Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University, where he has been a fellow, writer and associate since 2011. He […]