The National Science Foundation‘s Division of Materials Research (DMR), the Division of Mathematical Sciences (DMS), the Division of Electrical, Communications and Cyber Systems (ECCS), and the Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure (OAC) seek to rapidly accelerate quantum materials design, synthesis, characterization, and translation of fundamental materials engineering and information research for quantum devices, systems, and networks. The new program of Enabling Quantum Leap: Convergent Accelerated Discovery Foundries for Quantum Materials Science, Engineering, and Information (Q-AMASE-i) aims to support these goals by establishing Foundries with mid-scale infrastructure for rapid prototyping and development of quantum materials and devices. The new materials, devices, tools and methods developed by Q-AMASE-i will be shared with the science […]

The following Great Innovative Idea is from Mark Bernstein, the chief scientist at Eastgate Systems, Inc and Clare Hooper, an Independent Scholar in Vancouver, BC, Canada. Mark and Clare were winners at the recent Computing Community Consortium (CCC) sponsored Blue Sky Ideas Conference Track at the 29TH ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media, July 9-12, 2018 in Baltimore, MD. Their paper is called “A Villain’s Guide To Social Media And Web Science.” The Idea The great power and profitability of social media may not benefit the good and the bad alike; increasing evidence indicates that recent advances in data mining, social media, and web science all asymmetrically benefit the cruel, the dishonest, and the tyrant. Daily headlines reflect the appropriation and misuse of […]

The following is from Sonynka Ngosso from the Office of Strategic Coordination at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) announcing their new STRIDES (Science and Technology Research Infrastructure for Discovery, Experimentation, and Sustainability Initiative) initiative.  Dear Colleagues, Today NIH launched a new initiative to harness the power of commercial cloud computing and provide NIH biomedical researchers access to the most advanced, cost-effective computational infrastructure, tools, and services available.  The STRIDES (Science and Technology Research Infrastructure for Discovery, Experimentation, and Sustainability Initiative) Initiative counts Google Cloud as its first industry partner. In line with NIH’s first-ever Data Science Strategic Plan released in June, STRIDES will establish additional innovative public-private partnerships to broaden access to services and tools, including training for researchers […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) will hold a workshop from January 3rd to 5th, 2019 in Hawaii to create a vision for thermodynamic computing, a statement of research needs, and a summary of the current state of understanding of this new area. Workshop attendance will be by invitation only and travel expenses will be available for select participants. We seek short white papers to help create the agenda for the workshop and select attendees. Thermodynamics has a long history in the engineering of computing systems due to its role in power consumption, scaling, and device performance [1],[2]. In a different context, thermodynamically motivated algorithmic techniques are prevalent and highly successful […]

The following is from Sonynka Ngosso from the Office of Strategic Coordination at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) announcing the new Big Data to Knowledge Reserouces Page.  Dear Colleagues,   Big Data to Knowledge (BD2K) grantees developed a series of resources for the biomedical research and data science communities to use big data to answer biomedical research questions. Under current efforts to make the products of BD2K research usable, discoverable, and disseminated to the biomedical research community, the NIH Office of Strategic Coordination (OSC) released a webpage with direct hyperlinks to the resources developed through BD2K funding (https://commonfund.nih.gov/bd2k/resources).   The BD2K resource page will be updated periodically and populated with new resources as they become available. Please […]

The following is a blog post from ACM SIGARCH Computer Architecture Today that considers some potential flaws in emerging software mitigations of Spectre-V1 attacks. Earlier this year, Mark Hill, Chair of the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) wrote a CCC blog post on the effects of Meltdown/Spectre, which is referenced in this piece. Mark will also be part of a joint keynote at Hot Chips titled, “ Spectre/Meltdown and What It Means for Future Chip Design.”  Speculating about speculation: on the (lack of) security guarantees of Spectre-V1 mitigations   By Mark Silberstein, Oleksii Oleksenko, Christof Fetzer on Jul 2, 2018   Spectre and Meltdown opened the Pandora box of a new class of speculative execution attacks that defeat standard memory protection mechanisms. These attacks […]