The next WATCH Talk is scheduled for July 17 at noon EDT. Crispin Cowan will reflect on decades of defending imperfect software. Dr. Cowan works for Microsoft adding security to existing operating systems, including the recent Windows 8.1 release. He is especially interested in usable security and effective sandboxing.  Abstract:  “Perfect” (bug-free) software is impractically expensive and slow to produce, and so the vast bulk of consumer and enterprise software products are shipped when they are “good enough” but far from bug-free. As a consequence, there has been a constant struggle to keep attackers from exploiting these chronically inevitable bugs. Much of that attention has been on memory corruption attacks against […]

  We often hear about the dearth of women in computer science and engineering fields. Many organizations are working hard to attract and retain women in these fields. In an article titled 22 Most Powerful Women Engineers In the World, Business Insider showcases powerful women engineers.  From the article: There’s a huge push these days to encourage more girls to learn to code and to hire more women engineers once they graduate. The tech industry knows it can’t fill all the jobs it has while discouraging half the population from joining the industry. It also knows that it can’t do a good job of designing new tech products for women if women aren’t part of the […]

The 15th Annual Microsoft Research Faculty Summit is taking place July 14-15, 2014 in Redmond, WA.  There is an exciting program planned with topics including computing devices and the Internet of Things, hardware-software co-design, data visualization, crowdsourcing applications, machine learning, and the algorithms that underlie emerging fields, such as computational neuroscience.  If you’re not going to be in Redmond, you can still be a part of the action, as the event will be live streamed for all to see. Last year’s Research Faculty Summit was a huge success, you can read about in this blog post by Ed Lazowska.  This year looks to be just as promising!

The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) will have two live chat sessions on July 10 and July 24 about the AAAS Science & Technology (S&T) Policy Fellowship. The AAAS S&T Policy Fellowships are in seven policy areas and aim to provide diverse opportunities for accomplished scientists and engineers to participate in and contribute to the federal policymaking process. Fellows learn firsthand about the intersection of science and policy. Current and alumni fellows and fellowship staff will answer questions about the fellows’ science policy initiatives on Capitol Hill and at federal agencies, the career impact these fellowships can have, and the 2015-16 application process. July 10 at 2 p.m. EDT: You Too […]

We all have seen pictures of a driverless car, loaded with quite a bit of equipment on top of the car to help in the autonomous nature of the car.  On June 24, researchers from Carnegie Mellon University brought their next generation driverless car to Washington, DC at the request of Congressman Bill Shuster of Pennsylvania.   This next generation car doesn’t look much like it’s predecessor, BOSS, who won the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge.  Rather, it looks more like any “ordinary” car, as its top-of-the-line radar, cameras, sensors and other technologies are built into the body of the vehicle. The car’s computers are tucked away under the floor.  The goal of CMU’s researchers […]

The following is a special contribution to this blog by by CCC Executive Council Member Mark D. Hill of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Times they are a changing. In the 20th century many researchers and companies innovated within a layer (or two) of the computing software-hardware stack. Today there is pressure and opportunity to innovate across layers, as argued in a 2012 CCC white paper on 21st Century Computer Architecture. A fantastic example of this cross-layer innovation was recently presented in the International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA) by Putman et al. “A Reconfigurable Fabric for Accelerating Large-Scale Datacenter Services”  and reported in WIRED by Robert McMillan “Microsoft Supercharges Bing […]