The following is a guest blog post from Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council member Kathleen Fisher (Tufts University). Going to DARPA as a Program Manager (PM) is a great opportunity to make a difference by creating and managing a program much bigger in scope than what an individual faculty member can do at a university. Other PMs are talented and innovative thinkers who come from a broad range of backgrounds. Exposure to them and to the range of problems DARPA is reckoning with can be eye-opening. In the following paragraphs, I describe my experiences serving as a PM to convey a sense of what the job is like and why […]

Contributions to this post were provided by the Computing Research Association’s Senior Policy Analyst Brian Mosley. Yesterday, President Biden announced 30 of America’s most distinguished leaders in science and technology as members of his President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST). PCAST is the premier science advisory committee within the Executive Office of the President and is the sole body of advisors charged with making science, technology, and innovation policy recommendations to the President and the White House. Established by Executive Order, it is an independent Federal Advisory Committee composed of distinguished individuals from industry, academia, and non-profit organizations with a range of perspectives and scientific expertises.   The […]

The Climate Change AI (CCAI) organization, which is composed of volunteers from academia and industry who believe that tackling climate change requires concerted societal action in machine learning, has announced a new Call for Proposals: Climate Change AI Innovation Grants.  Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) can help support climate change mitigation and adaptation, as well as climate science, across many different areas, for example energy, agriculture, forestry, climate modeling, and disaster response (for a broader overview of the space, please refer to Climate Change AI’s interactive topic summaries and materials from previous events). However, impactful research and deployment have often been held back by a lack of data […]

On May 28th 2021, President Joe Biden released his $6 trillion request for the FY 2022 Federal Budget. A series of blogs analyzing the new budget was posted on the Computing Research Association’s Policy Blog. The budget reflects the new administration’s commitment to science with a 9% increase for Federal investments in government research and development including the following: nearly 20% increase for the National Science Foundation and the creation of a new Directorate of Technology Innovation and Partnerships (TIP) that would focus on technology development and transitioning federally funded research to the marketplace.  7% increase for funding to NASA 6% increase for DOE’s Office of Science  45% increase in […]

As part of efforts to improve scientific integrity, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and the Scientific Integrity Task Force are organizing a series of three virtual listening sessions on July 28-30 to hear from individual members of the public who produce, communicate, and use scientific and technical information. To help the Task Force understand how to strengthen the integrity of Federal Science, please sign-up to make a brief oral comment sharing your thoughts. Each of three virtual listening sessions will be organized around a particular theme as described below: Session 1: Communications – Effective policies and practices to improve the communication of scientific and technological information, […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is pleased to announce the release of a new white paper,  A National Discovery Cloud: Preparing the US for Global Competitiveness in the New Era of 21st Century Digital Transformation, led by Ian Foster with significant support from Daniel Lopresti, Bill Gropp, Mark D. Hill, and Katie Schuman. The three “pillars,” as the paper calls them, of this new computation fabric include the “emergence of public cloud utilities as a new computing platform; the ability to extract information from enormous quantities of data via machine learning; and the emergence of computational simulation as a research method on par with experimental science.”  In order for the […]