Over the past few weeks, we’ve been highlighting on this blog several of the excellent talks from the “Computation and the Transformation of Practically Everything” symposium held at MIT earlier this year. The symposium — part of MIT’s 150th anniversary celebration — described how computer science is changing the world. This week, we showcase another talk, this one by Tom Leighton, the Co-Founder and Chief Scientist of Akamai Technologies — a global leader in web acceleration and performance — and a Professor of Applied Mathematics at MIT. Leighton described the history of theoretical computer science, including key advances like the RSA encryption protocol, the Viterbi algorithm (which is used today in cell phones, digital TVs, etc., and […]

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 […]

David Ferrucci’s official title is “IBM Fellow and Leader of the Semantic Analysis and Integration Department at IBM’s T.J. Watson Research Center.” But to the world, he’s the genius behind Watson, the question-answering supercomputer system that bested two humans in a nationally televised broadcast of the popular game show Jeopardy! earlier this year. And not just any two humans, but the two very best players in the show’s 27-year history. On Monday, Ferrucci delivered a fantastic keynote at the ACM’s 2011 Federated Computing Research Conference in San Jose, CA. Ferrucci walked the audience — nearly 2,000 computer scientists from around the country — through the creation of Watson, from its initial conception […]

Farnam Jahanian, the Assistant Director for CISE, testified at a U.S. House of Representatives hearing on May 25th. The hearing, convened jointly by the Subcommittee on Technology and Innovation and the Subcommittee on Research and Science Education, examined Federal agency efforts to improve our nation’s cybersecurity and prepare the future cybersecurity talent needed for preserving national security. As part of his testimony, Jahanian listed a series of contributions the computing research community has made with support from NSF and other Federal funding agencies: Cryptographic schemes and cryptographic-based authentication, enabling today’s Internet commerce, supporting secure digital signatures and online credit card transactions Program analyses and verification techniques, enabling the early detection of […]

The NSF’s CISE and Biological Sciences (BIO) directorates have joined forces to seek interdisciplinary proposals that further the frontiers of both fields. In a recent Dear Colleague Letter (DCL) for Biological and Computing Shared Principles: The [BIO and CISE directorates] invite proposals that advance research focused on principles shared between the two disciplines. Proposals that include sustained, synergistic collaborations, leading to new advances in both disciplines, will be the most competitive. Proposals should address shared principles that contribute to conceptual advances in both biology and computing. We recognize that new ideas are emerging rapidly at the crossroads of the biological sciences and computing, and we encourage investigators to pursue novel focus […]