The National Academy of Sciences recently announced the election of 84 new members and 21 foreign associates from 15 countries in recognition of their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research. Those elected bring the total number of active members to 2,250 and the total number of foreign associates to 452. The list includes these five computer scientists: Manindra Agrawal, the N. Rama Rao Chair Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur, India. His research is in cryptography, complex analysis and combinatorics. Robert E. Kahn, the President and CEO of the Corporation for National Research Initiatives in Reston, Va. Recently he has been developing the […]

In response to the Cybersecurity Enhancement Act of 2014, federal agencies are developing a Federal cybersecurity research and development strategic plan. On behalf of the agencies, the NITRD Cybersecurity R&D Senior Steering Group seeks public input on research objectives for the strategic plan. The strategic plan will be used to guide and coordinate federally-funded cybersecurity research. Responses must be 25 pages or less and are due by June 19, 2015 to cybersecurity@nitrd.gov. For more information, please see the RFI’s link on the Federal Register.  Responders are asked to answer one or more of the following questions:   1. Section 201 (a)(1) of the Act identifies a number of cybersecurity objectives. What scientific, […]

The following guest blog post is from Tho Nguyen, AAAS Fellow in Computer Systems Research in the Directorate for Computer & Information Science & Engineering (CISE) at the National Science Foundation (NSF). Today marks the end of the 2015 Cyber-Physical Systems Week.  As part of the week of celebrations, NSF sponsored a meeting of early-career investigators in cyber-physical systems to focus on exploring research challenges and opportunities in Smart Cities. The Cyber-Physical Systems community is an exciting group of researchers and developers working to advance the emerging system science that deeply integrates computing (cyber) and engineered (physical) components. CPS enables truly “smart” technologies, systems, and infrastructures of the future. Examples of CPS today include the self-driving […]

  The National Academies Forum on Cyber Resilience held its inaugural meeting this week in Washington, DC. The Forum is focused on advancing the national dialogue about our cyber systems and their resilience and plans to address issues including cybersecurity and trustworthiness; stakeholder values; and preparation, response, and recovery in the face of malicious attacks, technological disruptions and natural disasters. It is chaired by Fred B. Schneider, directed by Lynette I. Millett, and made up of a multidisciplinary group of experts, with perspectives spanning research, practice, technology, and policy. The Forum will convene three times annually to plan and execute workshops and supplementary activities. At the public session this week, forum […]

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) invites the public to comment on a draft report from the Feb. 12, 2015, Executive Technical Workshop on Improving Cybersecurity and Consumer Privacy. The workshop, a collaboration with Stanford University, brought together chief technology officers, information officers and security executives to discuss the challenges their organizations and industrial sectors face in implementing advanced cybersecurity and privacy technologies. The following statement is from Donna Dodson, chief cybersecurity advisor for NIST. We’d like to hear from workshop participants and those who couldn’t be there to help us develop and prioritize future NIST cybersecurity projects. Feedback such as this helps us ensure that we focus […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) congratulates Michael Stonebraker from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) on receiving the 2014 ACM Turing Award for fundamental contributions to the concepts and practices underlying modern database systems. From the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) Website: An adjunct professor of computer science and engineering at MIT and a principal investigator at CSAIL, Stonebraker sometimes jokes that he didn’t know what he was researching for more than 30 years. “But then, out of nowhere, some marketing guys started talking about ‘big data,’” he says. “That’s when I realized that I’d been studying this thing for the better part of my academic life.” From the Turing […]