The following is a special contribution to this blog by CCC Executive Council Member Mark D. Hill of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Internet-based services that we have all come to love (e.g., search, email, social networks, video/photo sharing) are all powered by large back-end data centers, designed and managed as large warehouse-scale computers. Emerging cloud computing workloads also use such warehouse-scale computers, making it even more important to understand and optimize this class of computer systems. But until now, such warehouse-scale computers have (true to their name!) been big black boxes, with very little insight about detailed performance characteristics of deployments at scale: What is the nature of workloads that run […]

In case you missed it, Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council member Cynthia Dwork, distinguished scientist at Microsoft Research, and her co-authors Vitaly Feldman, research scientist at IBM’s Almaden Research Center; Moritz Hardt, research scientist at Google; Toniann Pitassi, professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto; Omer Reingold, principle researcher at Samsung Research America; and Aaron Roth, the Raj and Neera Singh Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer and Information Science in the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Engineering and Applied Science published an article in Science on The reusable holdout: Preserving validity in adaptive data analysis. In their paper they demonstrate a new approach for addressing the challenges […]

Every year the MIT Technology Review publishes a list of 35 innovators under the age of 35. They recently published the list for 2015. Of the 35 innovators, 13 are working on problems related to computer science. This list includes Travis Deyle who was a member of the Computing Community Consortium’s (CCC) CI Fellow program in 2011. He now works at the Google X research lab. He was part of the team that is working on glucose-measuring contact lenses. Some of the other computer scientists include Yevgen Borodin, the CEO of Charmtech Labs, who is developing software to help the blind listen to online content; Zakir Durumeric, a PhD student […]

The National Academies Forum on Cyber Resilience, which held their inaugural meeting last April, met again last week in Washington, DC. At the open session, Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Commissioner Julie Brill spoke about Security, Privacy, and the Internet of Things. The mission of the FTC is to “prevent business practices that are anticompetitive or deceptive or unfair to consumers; to enhance informed consumer choice and public understanding of the competitive process; and to accomplish this without unduly burdening legitimate business activity.” In terms of privacy and data security, Commissioner Brill stated that, at this point in time, the FTC has already handled 40 privacy cases and 60 security cases, including the Fandango and Credit Karma cases in […]

In December 2010 and then again in December 2012, the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) conducted an extensive review of the Federal Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) Program – the $4B coordinated multi-agency IT R&D program. PCAST has just released a 2015 follow-up report on the progress of the NITRD program, which was conducted by co-chairs of the PCAST NITRD Working Group Susan Graham (PCAST Member and UC Berkeley) and Greg Hager (Johns Hopkins University and the Computing Community Consortium Chair). Other PCAST NITRD Working Group Members included, William J. Dally (Stanford University), Eric Horvitz (Microsoft Research), Sara Kiesler (Carnegie-Mellon University), Michael McQuade (United Technologies […]

Google announced the finalists for its annual international science fair. There are projects from all over the world covering a wide variety of fields, including computer science.  All the projects are by scientists under 18 years old. The projects will be exhibited and judged at an event on September 21 at the Google Headquarters. You can browse through all 20 finalists at the Google Science Fair website, but here are two that stood out. ALAIR (Assisted Living Autonomous Internet Robot) by Benjamin Lourdes Hylak from Oxford, Pennsylvania. Benjamin, age 17, built an assisted living robot for $1,250 that can preform the duties of an in-home nurse, such as: Healthcare/homecare monitoring Pill […]