The Free/Open Source Software workshop wrapped up today.  Discussion focused on a number of topics, including: – Translation into other domains of software – Software engineering practice – Collaboration issues in FOSS – Learning and education challenges/opportunities – Evolution of products, projects, practices and processes – Research infrastructures A report from the workshop will be developed in the coming weeks and posted on the CCC Web site. John L. King, CCC Council Liaison

The attendees at the CCC-supported workshop on Free/Open Source Software met today at UC Irvine’s Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences to work in break-out groups on a refined classification scheme for open-source software development.   The group will work tomorrow morning to synthesize the results of today’s efforts into elements that can be reported out. John L. King, CCC Council liaison

Forty-five people met today in Newport Beach, CA for the first day of a three-day workshop supported by the CCC on Free/Open Source Software.  For more background information, see http://www.cra.org/ccc/foss.php  (Note that about five participants who were supposed to come were snowed in by the big storms in the east, and couldn’t make it.) Today’s discussion was structured around four perspectives on FOSS, with moderators, main presenters, and discussants: Users/Producers: Moderator — Greg Madey (Notre Dame University); Main Presenter — Ralph Morelli (Trinity College); Discussants — Stormy Peters (GNOME Foundation), John Wallin (George Mason University). Human-Centered Computing: Moderator — Walt Scacchi (UC Irvine); Main Presenter: Chris Kelty (UCLA); Discussants — […]

The CCC co-sponsored and co-organized the Discovery and Innovation in Health IT Workshop in San Francisco on October 29 and 30, 2009 (http://cra.org/ccc/visioning/visioning-activities/2012-activities/health-it/ ). The Discovery and Innovation in Health IT Workshop was an attempt to make further inroads on productive collaboration between healthcare and computing, exploring and defining fundamental computing research challenges and opportunities in healthcare IT in both the near- and long-term and identifying a range of “model” proof-of-concept, integrative systems that might serve as motivating and unifying forces to drive fundamental research in healthcare IT. Highlights of the workshop included plenary presentations by William Stead of Vanderbilt and Richard Bucholz of St. Louis University School of Medicine. […]

Why should you care about microbial communities? Except for viruses, they are the most abundant life on Earth and have an overwhelming effect on our environment and our lives. Consider that about half the carbon dioxide on Earth is processed through microbes that live in the oceans. Then consider that the most modern climate models of ocean life include just five organisms. This is despite recent findings that point to thousands of oceanic species, which do many different things and presumably influence our climate. Metagenomics is a relatively new field that seeks to understand the structure and function of the shockingly large number of microorganisms on our planet.  New technologies […]

The Cross-layer Reliability Visioning Study Group met July 8-9, 2009 in Los Alamos, NM.  This was the second of three scheduled meetings focused on how to address the growing challenges imposed by changes in device technology, system sizes, and application requirements.  A major goal of the Visioning process is to reach some consensus on how to achieve reliable computing using unpredictable components across different layers that dictate system reliability (i.e., device technology, design, architecture, software).  While the first meeting focused on defining the multi-dimensional cross-layer reliability design space, including both theoretical and practical aspects of the problem, the second meeting focused on considering cross-layer reliability from different application domains (e.g., […]