Am I safe sitting at home with my pacemaker? Am I safe shopping online? Am I safe when I am using my web-cam enabled computer? These are all real concerns brought up by audience members at the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) scientific session at the 2019 American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Annual Meeting in Washington, DC. This session called Cybersecurity: Transcending Physics, Technology, and Society was moderated by CCC Chair Mark D. Hill (University of Wisconsin-Madison). The speakers were Kevin Fu (University of Michigan), John Masters (Red Hat), and Zeynep Tufekci (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill). Kevin Fu started the session by asking the audience what happens if your […]

How can we feed the world’s population – projected to reach ten billion people by 2050 – in a sustainable way that preserves the health of individuals, communities, and the environment? How can computer science be utilized to improve food production, processing, and distribution? These were the main topics at the Computing Community Consortium’s (CCC) scientific session on Sustainably Feeding Ten Billion People that took place February 16th at the AAAS 2019 Annual Meeting. The panelists for this session were Diane Wang (SUNY Buffalo), Ranveer Chandra (Microsoft Research), and Abraham Stroock (Cornell), while Susan McCouch (Cornell) moderated the session. Diane Wang’s presentation on Coupling Nature and Nurture: Supercharging Predictions for […]

In May 2018, the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) hosted a workshop on quantum computing, titled Next Steps in Quantum Computing: Computer Science’s Role. The workshop brought together computer scientists – including computer architects, compiler experts, and programming wonks – with physicists and researchers from quantum computers. A workshop report was released in November, 2018. The workshop report is now available in a Japanese translation done by the Yoshi-aki Shimada of the Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST) on their Qmedia website, which focuses on quantum technology. Japan Science and Technology Agency was formed by merging two existing organizations: Japan Information Center of Science and Technology (JICST) and Research Development Corporation of […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is launching the “Catalyzing Computing” podcast, which will focus on topics of interest within the computing research community. The podcast is hosted by CCC Program Associate Khari Douglas and will feature interviews with researchers and policy makers about their background and experiences in the computing community. The podcast will also offer recaps of visioning workshops and other events hosted by the CCC. If you want to learn about some of the computing community’s most influential members or keep tabs on the latest areas of interest then, this is the podcast for you! The first episode of Catalyzing Computing features an interview of CCC Council Member Suresh […]

The following post was contributed by CCC Director, Ann Drobnis.  The Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) National Coordination Office (NCO), on behalf of Federal agencies and the NITRD Cybersecurity and Information Assurance Integrity Working Group, put out a Request for Information (RFI) from the public on the update to the 2016 Federal Cybersecurity Research and Development Strategic Plan. The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) responded to the RFI on behalf of the community. An overarching theme of the CCC response is that systems are now ubiquitous, and need to be considered as socio-technical systems that must be secured, not simply technical systems. One of the key recommendations for […]

The following is a special contribution to this blog by CCC Chair Mark D. Hill of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Josep Torrellas of University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and co-author of the report discussed below.  All too many of us have experienced how academia’s reward structure seems to favor small projects led by one principal investigator in the jurisdiction of a sub-discipline within a larger discipline. Moreover, the current stability of universities tends to slow the formation of new departments for new disciplines. In contrast, the problems and opportunities that our society faces in education, commerce, science, and government do not respect academia’s boundaries and can require expertise and progress from many aspects […]