The National Institutes of Health (NIH) recently released the following letter to the community announcing its Strategic Plan for Data Science.  Dear Colleagues, The National Institutes of Health (NIH) released its first-ever Strategic Plan for Data Science to capitalize on the opportunities presented by advances in data science.  The plan describes NIH’s overarching goals, strategic objectives, and implementation tactics for promoting the modernization of the NIH-funded biomedical data science ecosystem. We are grateful for the input from the community and the public received from the Request for Information, which was incorporated into the final plan. Over the course of the next year, NIH will begin implementing its strategy, with some elements of the […]

Sam Bowman from New York University provided contributions to this post. The 16th Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (NAACL HLT 2018) was held in New Orleans, June 1 to June 6, 2018. The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) sponsored the 2018 NAACL Student Research Workshop (SRW) in conjunction with NAACL HLT 2018. The SRW gave student researchers in natural language processing (NLP) the opportunity to present their work and receive constructive feedback and mentorship by experienced members of the ACL community. Twenty student participants from nine countries presented original research projects and thesis proposals as both talks and posters during […]

The following is a letter to the community from Erwin Gianchandani, Acting Assistant Director, of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Directorate of Computer & Information Science & Engineering (CISE).  Dear CISE Community, The NSF Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) is delighted to announce the appointment of Dr. Rance Cleaveland as the Division Director for the Division of Computing and Communication Foundations (CCF), effective July 9, 2018. Rance will be joining NSF/CISE from the University of Maryland at College Park (UMD), where he is currently Professor of Computer Science and was the Executive and Scientific Director of the Fraunhofer USA Center for Experimental and Software Engineering until 2014. Prior to joining the […]

Former CCC Council member and current CRA Board member Shashi Shekhar from the University of Minnesota provided contributions to this post. The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) Agriculture and Food Research Initiative’s Food and Agriculture Cyberinformatics and Tools (FACT) initiative has issued a call for proposals that 1) focus on fundamental or core big data analytics and tool development, and/or 2) apply big data concepts to specific science domains or across domains and sectors for any of the Plant health and production and plant products program area priorities. A snippet from the USDA/NIFA Request for Applications (RFA): This program area priority focuses […]

The next WATCH talk, called Why the Census Bureau Adopted Differential Privacy for the 2020 Census of Population, from John M. Abowd, Chief Scientist and Associate Director for Research and Methodology at the U.S. Census Bureau, is Wednesday, June 6th 2018, Noon-1PM EST. Dr. Abowd was the lead author of the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) white paper on Privacy-Preserving Data Analysis for the Federal Statistical Agencies in January 2017.  John M. Abowd is Associate Director for Research and Methodology and Chief Scientist at the United States Census Bureau and the Edmund Ezra Day Professor of Economics, Professor of Statistics and Information Science at Cornell University. At the Census Bureau, he leads a directorate of research centers, each devoted […]

The computers, smartphones, and tablets that we use every day are becoming more advanced. Older adults who have cognitive or physical disabilities might have trouble using such devices. Technology should not just be for the young. We need to start thinking about how we can better adapt devices to fit the needs of our aging population. Recently, the Wired posted an article called Bigger, Brighter, Simpler: A Tablet For The Mature User that highlights some features of tablets which allows older adults to use them more successfully. These features include: Clear Notifications A bright light illuminates the tab of the person just contacted, so users can keep track of in-progress conversations. Real Buttons Tablets […]