The following is a special contribution to this blog by by CCC Executive Council Member Mark D. Hill of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Background: Senior computer scientists remember memory “capabilities” as an abstraction for controlling access to objects in machines such as Burroughs B5000 and IBM System/38. In the late 20th century, capabilities lost out to virtual memory with a linear address and per-page protection, as these systems were faster and coarse-grain protection was deemed sufficient. In our 21st century, security is much more important and memory attacks often cross object boundaries (e.g., buffer overflow attacks). Vision:  Wouldn’t it be interesting if one could reincarnate capabilities for better memory security […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is releasing its third segment in the Computing Research in Action Series.   This segment features the Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp) research lab, led by Professor Shwetak Patel, at the University of Washington. The UbiComp lab, which consists of an interdisciplinary team of students (CS, EE, CE, ME), focuses on solving interesting and socially meaningful problems using a mix of hardware and software applications. The UbiComp lab focuses on four areas of ubiquitous computing: Novel interaction techniques: With the growing number of computers around us embedded into the environment, there is a need to interact with these computers beyond the traditional keyboard and mouse. Sustainability  sensing: Using computer science, machine learning and signal processing […]

The following entry is a special contribution to this blog from Hamidreza Chitsaz, Assistant Professor at Wayne State University. This year Hamidreza and Moslem Kazemi, Carnegie Mellon University organized a challenges and vision track at Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS 2013) on June 27th in Berlin, Germany.  The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) sponsored three challenges and vision best paper awards at Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) 2013, a premiere conference on robotics. The conference was held in Berlin, Germany June 24-28, at the Technische Universität Berlin. The best challenges and vision paper awards promote visioning and revolutionary novel ideas in robotics, on principles and applications that address the most difficult […]

The following is a special contribution to the blog from Jeff Rosenchein, Head of The Rachel and Selim Benin School of Computer Science and Engineering at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In this entry, Jeff highlights the CCC sponsored Challenges and Visions track at the twelfth international conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS ’13) held in St. Paul, Minnesota earlier this month. The Challenges and Visions Track was a new track, initiated for the first time at AAMAS’13 under the sponsorship of the Computing Community Consortium (CCC), an organization established to push the U.S. computing research community to pursue a bold vision for computing research. The CCC awards […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) sponsored a sustainability award at CHI 2013, ACM’s premiere conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. The conference was held in Paris, France April 27-May 2, at the Palais de Congrès de Paris. The best sustainability paper award promotes work at the intersection of computing and sustainability, on principles and applications that address environmental, economic, and societal needs in support of a more sustainable future. This year’s winning paper was: The Dubuque Electricity Portal: Evaluation of a City-Scale Residential Electricity Consumption Feedback System, authored by Tom Erickson (IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, USA), M. Li, Y. Kim, A. Deshpande, S. Sahu, T. Chao, P. Sukaviriya, and […]

The Wireless-Life Sciences Alliance is hosting it’s fourth annual Wireless Health conference on November 1-3, 2013 at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. The mission of the conference is to “provide the highest-quality academic health and industrial research forum to develop an international community that will accelerate the development and adoption of new technologies for improving health and lowering costs.” To support it’s mission, the organizers have issued a Call for Papers, Abstracts and Research demonstrations. From the call for submissions: To Submit a Paper for Review: The committee solicits original contributions in Health Technology, Engineering and Computer Science disciplines with applications in clinical practice and innovative applications of wireless health principles and […]