National Science Foundation (NSF) Assistant Director for the Directorate of Computer & Information Science & Engineering (CISE) James Kurose has issued the following letter to the community for pursuing meaningful actions in support of Broadening Participation in Computing (BPC). Dear Colleague: The National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) is committed to broadening the participation of underrepresented populations in computing and closely-related disciplines. Indeed, CISE supports meaningful actions that address the longstanding underrepresentation of various populations including women, minorities (African Americans/Blacks, Hispanic Americans, American Indians, Alaska Natives, Native Hawaiians, Native Pacific Islanders, and persons from economically disadvantaged backgrounds), and persons with disabilities, in the computing field. With this Dear […]

The next WATCH talk, called 35 Years of Cyberwar: The Squirrels are Winning is Thursday, July 20th, from 12 PM-1 PM ET. The presenter is Cris Thomas (aka Space Rogue) from IBM. Cris has an uncanny ability to link disparate events, read between the lines and distill complex, technical information into readily understandable, accessible and actionable intelligence. He and his colleagues created the first security research think tank, L0pht Heavy Industries, and the widely popular video news show The Hacker News Network. Eager to share his wealth of knowledge on security trends, Cris has testified before the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, and has been interviewed by media organizations […]

The next WATCH talk, called Confidentiality à la Carte with Cipherbase is Thursday, June 22th, from 12 PM-1 PM ET. The presenter is Donald Kossmann, who is the director of the Microsoft Research Lab in Redmond. He joined Microsoft in 2014. Before that, he was a professor in the Systems Group of the Department of Computer Science at ETH Zurich (Switzerland). He is the Chair of ACM SIGMOD and an ACM Fellow. He is a co-founder of four start-ups in the areas of Web data management and cloud computing. Abstract: Organizations move data and workloads to the cloud because the cloud is cheaper, more agile, and more secure. Unfortunately, the cloud […]

The following is a letter to the community from Jim Kurose, Assistant Director (AD) and Erwin Gianchandani, Deputy AD of the National Science Foundation‘s Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) regarding the FY2018 Budget Request that was released yesterday.  Dear CISE Community, Each year, the President transmits to Congress a budget request for the Executive Branch of the Federal government, including a request for the National Science Foundation (NSF).  Today, the President officially submitted that request for fiscal year (FY) 2018, which begins October 1, 2017, and continues through September 30, 2018.  The President’s FY 2018 Budget Request proposes $6.6 billion for NSF (a decrease of 11.1% from […]

The following is a guest blog post by Mitra Basu, Program Director in the Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Directorate at the National Science Foundation. The National Science Foundation (NSF) recently issued a new program solicitation, Semiconductor Synthetic Biology for Information Processing and Storage Technologies (SemiSynBio), aiming to support transformative research that will advance information processing and storage through the integration of synthetic biology concepts with semiconductor technologies. The program is a partnership among NSF’s Directorates for Biological Sciences (BIO), Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE), and Engineering (ENG), with the Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC) and Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA). The program synopsis reads as […]

The next WATCH talk, called Secure Hardware and Cryptography: Contrasts, Synergies and Challenges is Thursday, May 18th, from 12 PM-1 PM ET. The presenter is Srini Devadas, the Webster Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Devadas’s research interests span Computer-Aided Design (CAD), computer security, and computer architecture. He has received the 2014 IEEE Computer Society Technical Achievement award, the 2015 ACM/IEEE Richard Newton technical impact award, and the 2017 IEEE Wallace McDowell award for his research. Devadas is a MacVicar Faculty Fellow and an Everett Moore Baker teaching award recipient, considered MIT’s two highest undergraduate teaching honors. Abstract Numerous cryptographic protocols and mechanisms […]