National Science Foundation (NSF) Assistant Director for the Directorate of Computer & Information Science & Engineering (CISE) James Kurose has issued the following letter to the community describing the change to NSF CISE core and SaTC proposal submission dates: Dear Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Community, I’m writing to highlight an important change that will affect proposal submissions to a number of  CISE programs this coming fall.  Specifically, CISE has revised the submission windows for its core programs as well as the Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace (SaTC) program for the 2015-16 academic year. These changes were announced in a recent Dear Colleague Letter (NSF 15-079), and have been reflected in […]

The following is from the Office of Science and Technology Blog by Jo Handelsman, the Associate Director for Science at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. People’s appreciation of game-changing new technologies frequently ignores the long, often twisting path that transforms an idea from fundamental discovery to practical application.  Those who pay for the national research agenda may not always be aware of the early and fundamental work that makes today’s technologies possible.  For example, it was basic research presented in a then-obscure scientific paper by Albert Einstein in 1917 that ultimately translated into the invention of laser technology four decades later.  The development of similarly groundbreaking […]

The following Great Innovative Idea is from Sebastian Elbaum, Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and David S. Rosenblum, Dean of the School of Computing at the National University of Singapore. Their paper Known Unknowns: Testing in the Presence of Uncertainty won second place at the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) sponsored Blue Sky Ideas Conference Track series at the 22nd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE), November 16-22, 2014 in Hong Kong. The Innovative Idea Uncertainty is present in most systems we build today, whether introduced by human decisions, machine learning algorithms, external libraries, or sensing variability. This uncertainty leads to occasional misbehavior or incorrect output that is deemed to be acceptable. In the […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is releasing its fifth segment in the Computing Research in Action Series.  Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison are engaging in a very exciting interdisciplinary activity between computer science and medicine. Professor Eftychios Sifakis, collaborating with Dr. Court Cutting and Dr. Timothy King, has built a computer aided platform that allows surgeons in training to rehearse, plan, and experiment with surgical procedures before actually trying them out on a real patient. The research program is called the Skin Biophysics Surgical Simulator and is funded by the National Science Foundation‘s Smart and Connected Health initiative. My vision is that this product is going to improve the quality of patient care by offering the […]

The National Science Foundation (NSF) announced two five-year, center-scale awards to advance the frontier in cyber-physical systems (CPS). With these two new projects totaling $8.75 million, NSF has now invested more than $250 million since 2008 to build the foundational knowledge underlying all CPS. Extending the efforts of wearable CPS sensors and devices, one project will develop a very realistic cardiac and device model called “Cyberheart.” The CyberHeart platform will be used to test and validate medical devices faster and at a far lower cost than existing methods. CyberHeart could also be used to design safe, patient-specific device therapies, thereby lowering the risk to the patient. This project is highly collaborative. The […]

The 2nd ACM International Conference on Embedded Systems for Energy-Efficient Built Environments (BuildSys 2015) invites original contributions in the area of intelligent Systems for the Built Environment targeted particularly towards energy efficiency, improving performance, adding novel functionality, as well as deeply understanding infrastructure systems and the intercoupling between them. Over the past six years, BuildSys established itself first as the premier workshop for researchers, developers, and practitioners across interdisciplinary fields to present research results and exchange ideas in all information-driven aspects of the buildings. 2014 marked the first year for BuildSys as a full ACM conference. BuildSys this year will broaden its scope significantly to include all systems within the […]