Juliana Freire, New York University, will present “Towards Usability, Transparency, and Trust for Data-Intensive Computations,” part of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Computer & Information Science & Engineering (CISE) Distinguished Lecture Series on January 28th, 2020, from 11:00AM to 12:00PM ET. Juliana Freire is a Professor of Computer Science and Data Science at New York University. Previously, she was a faculty member at the University of Utah and Oregon Health & Sciences University, and a Research Staff Member at the Database Systems Research group at Bell Labs Research (Lucent Technologies). She is the elected chair of the ACM Special Interest Group on Management of Data (SIGMOD) and a council member of the Computing Research Association’s […]

The following is a letter to the community from Erwin Gianchandani (Acting Assistant Director) and JD Kundu (Acting Deputy Assistant Director) of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Directorate of Computer & Information Science & Engineering (CISE).   Dear Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Community, As we embark upon a new year (and decade!) of discovery and innovation, we want to take a moment to highlight the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) 10 Big Ideas – and specifically the opportunity for engagement by the CISE community in many of these. You may recall that NSF Director Dr. France A. Córdova first unveiled the Big Ideas in 2017 as a means to enable transformative, convergent research that […]

The following is an announcement from the National Science Foundation (NSF) Software and Hardware Foundations Program Directors Nina Amla, Anindya Banerjee, and Sol Greenspan announcing an up to $87M (over several years) new funding opportunity called Principles and Practice of Scalable Systems (PPoSS).  The solicitation cites many articles, including the Computing Community Consortium‘s 2012″21st Century Computer Architecture,”  as examples that “have outlined the need for computational systems that enable emerging, large-scale applications without the benefit of Dennard scaling (the “post-Moore’s Law” era).” Dear Colleagues, We would like to wish you a very happy new year! New Program Announcement: The Principles and Practice of Scalable Systems (PPoSS) program is to support a […]

The following blog post is from Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Vice Chair Elizabeth Bradley (University of Colorado Boulder) and CCC Executive Council member Suresh Venkatasubramanian (University of Utah). Algorithmic bias can be insidious, making it all but impossible to pinpoint factors that contribute to discrimination. This is particularly concerning in the context of high-stakes decisions. The new Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) guidelines around the use of algorithms to aid in housing decisions are an example of this. This HUD proposal acknowledges the existence of algorithmic bias but would shift much of the burden of proof to demonstrate discriminatory behavior back onto the plaintiffs, using standards for algorithmic […]

The following blog was written by Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Chair Mark D. Hill from the University of Wisconsin Madison. Due to technology challenges and potential societal benefits, NSF has provided sustained funding for issues surrounding effective scaling of parallel and distributed computing, including through the Exploiting Parallelism and Scalability (XPS) Program, begun in 2012, and the Scalable Parallelism in the Extreme (SPX) Program, started in 2016. To illuminate directions in this area, NSF commissioned a workshop held in June 2019 as part of the Federated Computing Research Conference and led by Michael Carbin of MIT and Scott D. Stoller of Stony Brook University. The workshop report was recently issued. […]

The following is a guest blog from Sarita V. Adve from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Ratislav Bodik and Luis Ceze from the University of Washington, co-organizers of the DARPA ISAT I-USHER study. We are pleased to share the results of a DARPA ISAT study, I-USHER: Interfaces to Unlock the Specialized HardwarE Revolution, arguing for new hardware/software interfaces to enable the revolution promised by hardware specialization. Advances in hardware specialization are expected to deliver several orders of magnitude improvements in performance, cost, and energy efficiency over the next decade, bringing the promise of revolutionizing applications in datacenters to invisible computing.  To harness the power of this new class […]