This Thursday President Obama will host the White House Frontiers Conference, a national convening co-hosted with the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) to explore the future of innovation here and around the world. The Computing Community Consoritum (CCC) Chair Beth Mynatt and Director Ann Drobnis and are excited to participate in the conference. It will focus on building U.S. capacity in science, technology, and innovation through a number of different tracks, including Personal, Local, National, Global, and Interplanetary. The CCC has done a lot of work in the Local track space, which is on smart inclusive communities. One of the presenters, Charlie Catlett from the University of Chicago and Argonne National Lab, was one […]

The following blog post is by CCC Vice Chair and University of Wisconsin-Madison Professor Mark D. Hill.  I write about a recent Computer Science and Telecommunications Board (CSTB), an operating unit within the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, workshop report “Continuing Innovation in Information Technology.” This report updates famous “Tire Tracks” diagram for IT (Figure I.1, P. 5). Literally, “tire tracks” is a dense illustration of how federally-funded university research and industrial research and development (R&D) precede the emergence of large IT industries by decades. On one hand, this diagram shows “old” areas like Personal Computers that exceeded $1G annual revenue in the mid-1980s and then exceeded $10G the early 2000s. On the other hand, it […]

The following is a guest blog post by Beth Mynatt, Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Vice Chair and professor of Interactive Computing and the executive director of Georgia Tech‘s Institute for People and Technology (IPaT).  The Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) Pioneers Project draws attention to HCI trail-blazers by describing their backgrounds and contributions. Ben Shneiderman, Professor of Computer Science at the University of Maryland, started the personal photo journal as a tribute to these individuals and as a celebration of their contributions to HCI. He hopes to make the pioneer’s projects more visible to a wider audience by featuring them on the website. Ben always had his camera with him at major conferences and […]

The time is now for computer science education! With the shifting economy, educators are increasingly recognizing computer science as a new basic requirement. In his final State of the Union address, President Barack Obama said that “helping students learn to write computer code” is among his goals for the year ahead. Jim Kurose, the Assistant Director of the National Science Foundation (NSF) for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) released a letter to the community acknowledging the excitement in the community but also noting to “please stay tuned as the Administration announces new steps in the coming weeks to support efforts to expand access to computer science education across the Nation.” White House Office of Science Technology Policy U.S. Chief Technology […]

This post was contributed by Shashi Shekhar, Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council member and Distinguished University Professor at the University of Minnesota.  National Science Foundation (NSF) in partnership with U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA)/National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) recently issued the awaited INFEWS solicitation 16-524 with a budget of $50M. Proposals are due in late March, 2016. It’s estimated number of awards is between 22 and 40 across four tracks, namely, FEW system modeling, Visualization and Decision Support, Innovative Systems Solutions and Education/Workforce Development. Computing topics show up in all tracks and quite frequently in the second track. Synopsis: Humanity is reliant upon the physical resources and natural systems of the Earth […]

Stanford University, in conjunction with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Research Councils of the United Kingdom (RCUK) with support from the National Science Foundation (NSF), is hosting a Transatlantic Data Science Workshop. This two-day workshop will be held on March 1-2, 2016 at the NIH campus in Bethesda, MD. The objectives of this workshop are: To facilitate the development of novel computational approaches to health; To guide computer scientists, data scientists, statisticians, computational scientists, and mathematicians in discovering and accessing US and UK health datasets; and To support early stage researchers in establishing interdisciplinary, international collaborations. The first day of the workshop will be devoted to exploring […]