Contributions to the post were provided by Yair Rotstein, head of the US-Israel Binational Science Foundation (BSF). The US National Science Foundation (NSF) and the US-Israel Binational Science Foundation (BSF) signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) on Research Cooperation, which provides an overarching framework to encourage collaboration between US and Israeli research communities and sets out the principles by which jointly supported activities might be developed. The MOU provides for an international collaboration arrangement whereby US researchers may receive funding from the NSF and Israeli researchers may receive funding from the BSF. This is part of a larger program; see the NSF Dear Colleague Letter from last summer here. The goal of […]

Recently, the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) posted about the USDA/NIFA Food and Agriculture Cyber-infrastructure and Tools (FACT) initiative.  Check out this webinar about FACT on Wednesday, June 27th at 2PM ET.  FACT seeks to catalyze activities that harness big data for synthesizing new knowledge, making predictive decisions, and fostering data-supported innovation in agriculture. Projects funded through FACT will work to examine the value of data for small and large farmers, agricultural and food industries, and gain an understanding of how data can impact the agricultural supply chain, reduce food waste and loss, improve consumer health, environmental and natural resource management, affect the structure of U.S. food and agriculture sectors, and increase U.S. competitiveness. The webinar will […]

The following is a blog post from the ACM SIGARCH Computer Architecture Today. The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) has also done work in the quantum computing (QC) space, including hosting a recent workshop called Next Steps in Quantum Computing: Computer Science’s Role. The workshop brought together an interdisciplinary crowd of colleagues from classical computer science disciplines as well as domain-experts from quantum computing. It addressed the huge gap between problems for which a quantum computer might be useful (such as chemistry problems, material science problems, etc) and what we can currently build, program, and run. The goal of the QC research community, as is briefly mentioned in the blog below, is to close the gap so […]

The following is a guest blog post by Adam Chlipala, associate professor of computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Many discussions of computer security adopt metaphors from war or biology. There is an arms race between attackers finding new ways to compromise systems, defenders implementing new mitigations, attackers figuring out how to breach them, and so on. Our systems must be prepared for great varieties of different attacks, each handled with its unique antibodies, which unfortunately can only be cooked up by surviving earlier, related attacks. What’s essential is constant vigilance, and we never quite know what could go horribly wrong the next time. The game could change if […]

Sam Bowman from New York University provided contributions to this post. The 16th Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (NAACL HLT 2018) was held in New Orleans, June 1 to June 6, 2018. The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) sponsored the 2018 NAACL Student Research Workshop (SRW) in conjunction with NAACL HLT 2018. The SRW gave student researchers in natural language processing (NLP) the opportunity to present their work and receive constructive feedback and mentorship by experienced members of the ACL community. Twenty student participants from nine countries presented original research projects and thesis proposals as both talks and posters during […]

Former CCC Council member and current CRA Board member Shashi Shekhar from the University of Minnesota provided contributions to this post. The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) Agriculture and Food Research Initiative’s Food and Agriculture Cyberinformatics and Tools (FACT) initiative has issued a call for proposals that 1) focus on fundamental or core big data analytics and tool development, and/or 2) apply big data concepts to specific science domains or across domains and sectors for any of the Plant health and production and plant products program area priorities. A snippet from the USDA/NIFA Request for Applications (RFA): This program area priority focuses […]