The 24-minute scientific documentary that was released this summer about the dynamics of the sun may soon be coming to a planetarium near you. “Solar Superstorms” is a new documentary that features data-driven visualizations that have been computed on the giant new supercomputing initiative, Blue Waters, based at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The documentary deputed on June 30th, 2015 at the Louisiana Art and Science Museum in Baton Rouge and has since then been appearing in over a dozen planetariums around the world. “Solar Superstorms” is part of project CADENS (Centrality of Digitally Enabled Science). CADENS is a National Science Foundation […]

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has recently announced a partnership with Intel Corporation  on two new grants for $6 million to research security and privacy solutions of cyber-physical systems (CPS). Cyber-physical systems, such as smart-homes and autonomous vehicles, are part of the rise of the new Internet of Things (IoT). “Advances in the integration of information and communications technologies are transforming the way people interact with engineered systems,” said Jim Kurose, head of Computer and Information Science and Engineering at NSF. “Rigorous interdisciplinary research, such as the projects announced today in partnership with Intel, can help to better understand and mitigate threats to our critical cyber-physical systems and secure the nation’s […]

The following is a special contribution to this blog by CCC Executive Council Member Mark D. Hill of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Full disclosure: He had the pleasure of working with one of the authors of the discussed paper—Sarita Adve—on her 1993 Ph.D. Great conundrums include: * Will I drink coffee or tea? * Shall I have cake or ice cream? * Should I use a cache or scratchpad? While most readers will not face the last choice, it is important for saving time and energy in the devices we love by keeping frequently-used information close at hand. Caches are the workhorse of modern computers, feeding the processor with data […]

Texas A&M University‘s Raytheon Professor of Computer Science and Engineering and former Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council Member, Robin Murphy recently gave a TED talk on Disaster Robots. Robots don’t replace people or dogs…They do things new. They assist the responders, the experts, in new and innovative ways. Robin Murphy, explains how if you can reduce the initial emergency response by one day, you can reduce the overall recovery by 1000 days. If the initial responders can get in, save lives… that means the other groups can get in to restore the water, the roads, the electricity, which means then the construction people, the insurance agents, all of them can get in to rebuild […]

  The following Great Innovative Idea is from Sergey Levine, Chelsea Finn, Trevor Darrell, and Pieter Abbeel in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences (EECS) Department at the University of California Berkeley. Their End-to-End Training of Deep Visuomotor Policies paper was one of the winners at the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) sponsored Blue Sky Ideas Track Competition at the AAAI-RSS Special Workshop on the 50th Anniversary of Shakey: The Role of AI to Harmonize Robots and Humans in Rome, Italy. It was a half day workshop on July 16th during the Robotics Science and Systems (RSS) 2015 Conference. The Innovative Idea Techniques like reinforcement learning and optimal control offer the promise of automating robotic decision making by using […]

The National Institute of Health (NIH) supported center for physics-based Simulation of Biological Structures (Simbios) at Stanford University has developed OpenSim, a free software tool that can model and simulate movement of humans and animals.