The next WATCH talk, called Crypto Wars: Plus ça Change, Plus c’est la Même Chose is Thursday, April 21, 2016 from Noon-1pm EDT. The presenter will be Susan Landau, professor of Cybersecurity Policy in the Department of Social Science and Policy Studies at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Landau works at the intersection of cybersecurity, national security, law, and policy. During the Crypto Wars of the 1990s, her insights on how government encryption policy skewed civil society and business needs for security helped win the argument for a relaxation of cryptographic export controls. Beginning in the early 2000s, Landau was an early voice in the argument that law-enforcement requirements for embedding surveillance within […]

The National Science Foundation (NSF) Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) is pleased to announce a distinguished lecture on Wednesday, April 20, 2016 at 2:00pm EDT by Dr. Daniela Rus titled Pervasive Robots. Daniela Rus is a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at MIT. She is also a Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council Member. Rus’s research interests are in robotics, mobile computing, and data science. Rus is a Class of 2002 MacArthur Fellow, a fellow of ACM, AAAI and IEEE, and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. She earned her PhD in Computer […]

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 to announce the appointment of Ken Calvert as NSF CISE Division of Computer and Network Systems (CNS) Division Director.  Dear Colleagues, I’m very pleased to announce the appointment of Dr. Kenneth (Ken) Calvert to the position of Division Director for the CISE Division of Computer and Network Systems (CNS), effective May 2016. Ken has already begun his service at NSF as an Expert this month. Ken will be joining NSF from the University of Kentucky, where he is Professor of Computer Science. He has served as Chair of […]

The National Science Foundation (NSF) Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) is pleased to announce a distinguished lecture on Thursday, March 31, 2016 at 2:00pm EST by Dr. Andrew Moore titled Google-tech to CMU-SCS-tech: Strategy around Data, Augmented Humans and Autonomy. Andrew W. Moore PhD, a distinguished computer scientist with expertise in machine learning and robotics, became dean of the Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science in August 2014. He had previously served as a professor of computer science and robotics before taking a leave of absence to become founding director of Google’s Pittsburgh engineering office in 2006. Moore’s research interests broadly encompass the field of “big data”–applying statistical methods and mathematical formulas to massive quantities […]

The next WATCH talk, called The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work is Thursday, March 24, 2016 from Noon-1pm EDT. The presenter will be Phillip Rogaway, professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of California, Davis. Rogaway studied cryptography at MIT (1991), then worked as a security architect for IBM before joining the faculty at the University of California, Davis in 1994. Co-inventor of “practice-oriented provable security,” Rogaway’s work seeks to meld cryptographic theory and cryptographic practice in a mutually beneficial way. Abstract: Cryptography rearranges power: it configures who can do what, from what. This makes cryptography an inherently political tool, and it confers on the field an intrinsically moral dimension. […]

The next WATCH talk, called Privacy: Plural, Contextual, Contestable but not Unworkable is Thursday, March 17, 2016 from Noon-1pm EDT. The presenter is Deirdre K. Mulligan an Associate Professor in the School of Information at UC Berkeley, co-Director of the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology, Chair of the Board of Directors of the Center for Democracy and Technology, a Fellow at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Policy lead for the NSF-funded TRUST Science and Technology Center. She is also one of the lead organizers for the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Privacy by Design workshop series. Prior to joining the School of Information in 2008, Mulligan was a Clinical Professor of Law, founding […]