The National Science Foundation (NSF) Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) is pleased to announce a distinguished lecture on Wednesday, May 20, 2015 at 2:00 pm EST by Dr. Kathy Yelick titled CDL – More Data, More Science and……Moore’s Law?.  Kathy Yelick, a newly elected Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council member who will start her term in July, studies programming languages, compilers, and algorithms for parallel machines. She currently leads the Computing Sciences directorate at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), which includes National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, Energy Sciences Network and a research division of scientists and engineers in applied math, computer science and computational science. She earned her Ph.D in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science […]

In April, the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) commissioned members of the privacy research community to generate a short report to help guide strategic thinking in this space. The effort aimed to complement and synthesize other recent documents, including the White House BIG DATA: Seizing Opportunities, Preserving Values Report and the Report to the President on Big Data and Privacy: A Technological Perspective. Today, the CCC is releasing the resultant community report, Towards a Privacy Research Roadmap for the Computing Community: Great advances in computing and communication technology are bringing many benefits to society, with transformative changes and financial opportunities being created in health care, transportation, education, law enforcement, national security, […]

The following is a letter to the community from Sushil K. Prasad in the Directorate for Computer & Information Science & Engineering (CISE) Division of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure (ACI) at the National Science Foundation (NSF). Dear Colleagues, I am pleased to inform you of ACI’s emerging CAREER program for junior faculty members in the wider computational science and engineering disciplines (NSF 15-555).  Please see NSF’s Dear Colleague Letter about this program.  CAREER is the most prestigious NSF award supporting the junior faculty as a teacher-scholar with a minimum award of $400K over five years.  Top 20 of these awardees are nominated each year for the Presidential Early Career Awards.  The proposals are due on July 21, 2015. […]

The following is a guest blog post by Dr. Robin Murphy, Raytheon Professor of Computer Science and Engineering and Faculty Fellow for Innovation in High-Impact Learning Experiences at Texas A&M University.  The Nepal earthquake illustrates the need for critical real-time computing and information systems, dubbed “CRICIS computing” by a 2012 NSF/CCC visioning workshop. The findings from the CRICIS report still hold: that disasters require “fundamental new research in socio-technical systems that enable decision-making for
extreme scales under extreme conditions. This research cuts across physical and engineered artifacts, information technology, and human-computer collaboration. It is an example of the general shift in science and industry from physical devices and computational packages to socio-technical information systems […]

The following Great Innovative Idea is from Dr. Xiaojin (Jerry) Zhu, Associate Professor of Computer Science at University of Wisconsin-Madison. Zhu’s paper Machine Teaching: an Inverse Problem to Machine Learning and an Approach Toward Optimal Education won the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) sponsored Blue Sky Ideas Conference Track series at the 29th Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-15), January 25-30, 2015 in Austin, Texas. The Innovative Idea Machine teaching is machine learning turned upside down: it is about finding the optimal (e.g. the smallest) training set.  For example, consider a “student” who runs the Support Vector Machine learning algorithm.  Imagine a teacher who wants to teach the student a specific target hyperplane in some […]

The National Academy of Sciences recently announced the election of 84 new members and 21 foreign associates from 15 countries in recognition of their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research. Those elected bring the total number of active members to 2,250 and the total number of foreign associates to 452. The list includes these five computer scientists: Manindra Agrawal, the N. Rama Rao Chair Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur, India. His research is in cryptography, complex analysis and combinatorics. Robert E. Kahn, the President and CEO of the Corporation for National Research Initiatives in Reston, Va. Recently he has been developing the […]