In 2009, President Obama issued a Memorandum on Transparency and Open Government.  That memorandum has been followed by additional memorandums and Executive Orders resulting in the Open Government Initiative.  As a result of this initiative, governments (both federal and local) are releasing data feeds, which have enabled the creation and use of new applications, from real-time accurate traffic information to localized crime reporting. While the Initiative is presented as “an unqualified good” there are some questions about the impact on citizens.  As such, the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology and Microsoft have issued an RFP to further explore the technical, legal, and regulatory implications of Open Data.  From the solicitation: The […]

July 31, 2014 marks Farnam Jahanian’s final day as Assistant Director for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) at the National Science Foundation (NSF). In this position, which he has held since February 1, 2011, Farnam has been a indefatigable champion for the computer science research community.  He led the launch of three Presidential Initiatives: the National Robotics Initiative, the Big Data Research and Development Initiative, and US Ignite.  He led the Directorate through the creation of 25 new solicitations, many of which were cross-directorate, and he spearheaded the expansion of interagency and international collaborations: Smart and Connected Health with NIH; Collaborative Research in Computational Neuroscience with NIH, Israel, France and […]

Below is a Letter from Dr. Farnam Jahanian, Assistant Director at the National Science Foundation (NSF) for the Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Directorate. Dear CISE Community, I am delighted to announce that Dr. Keith Marzullo has been reappointed to the position of the Director of the Division of Computer and Network Systems (CNS) at NSF, effective July 2014. Dr. Marzullo has been an exemplary member of the CISE senior management team for the past several years, and we are thrilled that he will continue in his current position. Dr. Marzullo has brought significant broad scientific expertise to CISE and CNS research areas and will continue to provide strong leadership in cybersecurity, networking and distributed systems, cyber physical systems, and other areas in […]

The next WATCH Talk is scheduled for July 17 at noon EDT. Crispin Cowan will reflect on decades of defending imperfect software. Dr. Cowan works for Microsoft adding security to existing operating systems, including the recent Windows 8.1 release. He is especially interested in usable security and effective sandboxing.  Abstract:  “Perfect” (bug-free) software is impractically expensive and slow to produce, and so the vast bulk of consumer and enterprise software products are shipped when they are “good enough” but far from bug-free. As a consequence, there has been a constant struggle to keep attackers from exploiting these chronically inevitable bugs. Much of that attention has been on memory corruption attacks against […]

The National Science Foundation’s Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) invites you to attend a webinar to learn more about its recently released solicitation, Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Research Initiation Initiative (CRII) (see our previous blog post). The webinar is designed to describe the goals and focus of the CRII solicitation, help investigators understand its scope, and answer any questions potential PIs may have. The webinar will be held from 3pm to 4pm EDT on Monday, July 28, 2014. Questions about the solicitation can be submitted in advance or during the webinar to crii@nsf.gov. Please register by 11:59pm EDT on Thursday, July 24, 2014.      

We all have seen pictures of a driverless car, loaded with quite a bit of equipment on top of the car to help in the autonomous nature of the car.  On June 24, researchers from Carnegie Mellon University brought their next generation driverless car to Washington, DC at the request of Congressman Bill Shuster of Pennsylvania.   This next generation car doesn’t look much like it’s predecessor, BOSS, who won the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge.  Rather, it looks more like any “ordinary” car, as its top-of-the-line radar, cameras, sensors and other technologies are built into the body of the vehicle. The car’s computers are tucked away under the floor.  The goal of CMU’s researchers […]