President Obama is scheduled to address the nation from the campus of Carnegie Mellon University at 11am EDT today. The President’s speech is expected to focus on American innovation and competitiveness: The president will be highlighting the importance of manufacturing to the U.S. economy, as well as key steps that government, industry and universities will take together to create new industries and new jobs. He will deliver remarks on the need to focus on cross-cutting technologies that will enhance the global competitiveness of U.S. manufacturing and speed up ideas from the drawing board to the manufacturing floor.   The visit will take place at Carnegie Mellon University’s National Robotics Engineering Center […]

For those of you in the Washington, DC, area, the NSF is hosting a series of talks about trustworthy computing. It’s called the Washington Area Trustworthy Computing Hour (WATCH): Today we are regularly obliged to trust a cyberinfrastructure that is in fact untrustworthy. Transforming today’s infrastructure into one that can meet society’s growing demands is major national challenge and opportunity. Meeting the challenge requires not only technical advances in the fabric of computing and communication but also improved understanding of how individuals and organizations comprehend and use technology, how economic and policy incentives can affect adoption of new technology, and how to develop human-centered systems that can serve users with different […]

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 […]