Today I attended a panel discussion on “The Role of the Cloud in the Smart Grid”, sponsored by Microsoft’s Innovation & Policy Center and the Digital Energy Solutions Campaign (DESC). The discussion — which featured leading government and industry officials — ranged widely from privacy implications to efficiency benefits, but there were a few key takeaway points that impressed me: Smart grids will empower consumers with real-time feedback about the services for which they are paying. Wired Magazine ran an article over the weekend discussing how feedback about our electricity habits (among other things) can help reshape behavior, conserve energy, and improve efficiency. As high-consumption items like electric cars become more […]

A new National Science and Technology Council report released Monday — titled A Policy Framework for 21st Century Grid — describes ways to speed development of a smart grid that reduces energy consumption, efficiently delivers power from renewable sources, and decreases the frequency and length of blackouts. What’s most interesting — to us, anyway — is how the report calls attention to the need for fundamental research in several areas of computer science. Notably, “the four essential pillars that will enable the U.S. to transition to a smarter grid” all feature aspects of IT R&D prominently: Enable Cost-Effective Smart Grid Investments: Smart grid technology can drive improvements in system efficiency, resiliency, and […]

Following up on an article about rising enrollments in computer science this past Saturday, The New York Times has just published a fabulous Room for Debate essay series titled “Computer Science’s ‘Sputnik Moment’?“: Computer science is a hot major again. It had been in the doldrums after the dot-com bust a decade ago, but with the social media gold rush and the success of “The Social Network,” computer science departments are transforming themselves to meet the demand. At Harvard, the size of the introductory computer science class has nearly quadrupled in five years.   The spike has raised hopes of a ripple effect throughout the American education system — so much so […]

There’s a great article in today’s New York Times describing the recent rise in enrollments in computer science — spurred in part by “Hollywood’s portrayal of the tech world, as well as celebrity entrepreneurs like Steven P. Jobs of Apple and [Mark] Zuckerberg [of Facebook] who make products that students use every day.” On the rise in enrollments: The number of computer science degrees awarded in the United States began rising in 2010, and will reach 11,000 this year, after plummeting each year since the end of the dot-com bubble in 2004, according to the Computing Research Association, which tracks enrollment and degrees… The number of students who are pursuing the degree […]

The NSF’s CISE Directorate and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) are co-sponsoring a pair of workshops on US Ignite and GigU — initiatives we’ve covered in this space before — at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, OH, today and tomorrow. For those interested, you can watch live webcasts of the plenary sessions here (note the timings): – Today 1-2pm EDT (right now!): Kickoff panel with Jim Baller (PSGW), Blair Levin (GigU), and Suzi Iacono (NSF/CISE) – Friday 11:30am-12:30pm EDT: Closing panel with Jim Baller (PSGW), Blair Levin (GigU), and Suzi Iacono (NSF/CISE) (Contributed by Erwin Gianchandani, CCC Director)

Calling her colleagues the “best-in-class scientists and engineers [who] come to serve their country,” DARPA Director Regina Dugan described in a recent interview at the D9 Conference how her agency is driving technological innovations that better enable our nation’s military to “create and prevent strategic surprise.” Among the topics she discussed was cybersecurity: One of the things we have been investigating is how you design hardware and software within a computer so that you can determine yourself, or the computer itself can evolve, based on its own experience with threat. It’s modeled after the human immune system. An awful lot of the reason that people haven’t investigated these types of […]