Contributions to the following blog were made by former CCC Chair Gregory Hager and CCC Director Ann Drobnis.  We all know there is a lot of data out there, and the amount of data is growing rapidly – 2500 petabyes a day by some estimates. For data-driven fields such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), the availability of massive amounts of data and vast advances in computing power have now brought us to a unique and exciting phase where the availability of data is a major factor shaping the evolution of AI research. The Information Technology & Innovation Foundation (ITIF) recently released report called 10 Steps Congress Can Take to Accelerate Data […]

National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) announced the release of a draft Special Publication (SP) on Securing Wireless Infusion Pumps in Healthcare Delivery Organizations, which is now available for public comment. This is an important area that Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council member Kevin Fu from the University of Michigan has been working in for many years. In February 2016, Fu attended the White House meeting of medical device security stakeholders and domain experts to discuss the cybersecurity challenges faced by healthcare delivery organizations and medical device manufacturers. In March 2017, the New York Times released an article called It’s Possible to Hack a Phone With Sound Waves, Researchers Show, which highlights Fu’s […]

We hear all about “smart cities” but what about smart rural communities? We cannot forget about our rural populations, which we depend on for agriculture, fishing, forestry, manufacturing, and mining. Recently, the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) in collaboration with the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department Heads Association (ECEDHA) released eight white papers describing a collective research agenda for intelligent infrastructure. We will be blogging about each paper over the next few weeks. Today, we highlight A Rural Lens on a Research Agenda for Intelligent Infrastructure paper. Sparse population densities drive many of the challenges facing rural areas; these are problems that differ from high-density urban areas. They often lack the range of services that a city […]

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Defense Sciences Office (DSO) is sponsoring a Discover DSO Day (D3) on June 15, 2017, to familiarize attendees with DSO’s mission and research areas of interest, promote understanding of how to do business with DSO, and facilitate discussions with potential performers. The mission of the DSO is to identify and pursue high-risk, high-payoff research initiatives with the objective to prevent and create scientific and technical surprise. DSO Program Managers have started to develop program concepts in the following areas and plan to discuss as many as time permits during D3. Complexity Engineering: Understanding the principles of organization and control, the transformation or harnessing […]

The following is a guest blog post by Mitra Basu, Program Director in the Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Directorate at the National Science Foundation. The National Science Foundation (NSF) recently issued a new program solicitation, Semiconductor Synthetic Biology for Information Processing and Storage Technologies (SemiSynBio), aiming to support transformative research that will advance information processing and storage through the integration of synthetic biology concepts with semiconductor technologies. The program is a partnership among NSF’s Directorates for Biological Sciences (BIO), Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE), and Engineering (ENG), with the Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC) and Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA). The program synopsis reads as […]

Contributions to this blog were made by Michael Dunaway from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and CCC Council Member Daniel Lopresti from Lehigh University.  What if a Category 5 hurricane were heading towards New Orleans right now? What would happen in 2017 that did not happen in 2005? We have learned a great deal from the lessons of Hurricane Katrina and other major incidents, and disaster prevention and recovery has dramatically improved in the last 12 years. Much of the improvement can be attributed to the integration of technology with a “whole of community” approach to emergency management that combines FEMA’s National Incident Management System, with advanced data visualization, […]