Greg Hager, former Computing Community Consortium (CCC) chair and Mandell Bellmore Professor of Computer Science at The Johns Hopkins University, contributed to this post. Last week, the CRA Board of Directors announced that Tom Kalil was selected as the 2017 recipient of the CRA Distinguished Service Award for “his long history of leading national initiatives that have had a transformational impact on the computing research community and as an exemplary spokesperson, advocate, and collaborator for the computing research community.” According to Greg Hager, former CCC chair, “Tom has a unique ability to envision and articulate the impact of major science and technology initiatives and, even more importantly, to find mechanisms to bring them […]

This month’s Data Science Roundtable called Anti-Social Computing: Bots, Lies, and the New Information Environment is co-hosted by the South Hub, West Hub, and Northeast Hub. It will be held on Thursday, March 9th, 2017 from Noon-1:15 PM EST. Panelists will explore how social media, online news, blogs, etc. – in conjunction with widespread access to the Internet from multiple devices – are creating a new information environment. In this environment, the norms of social interaction, conversation, public discourse, and news reporting are being rewritten. Trolls and bots can shape conversation, shift discourse, and build bridges among groups who might not otherwise connect. The panel will explore how fake news can spread and […]

CCC Chair Beth Mynatt contributed to this post.  The Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) program, an interagency Federal-coordinating group, recently posted a draft Smart Cities and Communities Federal Strategic Plan for public comment. The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) responded to the request and submitted a response to the draft strategic plan. From the CCC Response: While this plan lays out a comprehensive, multi-agency approach for smart cities and communities, bridging research to implementation to evaluation, this plan does not fully capture the transformative potential to reshape our lived environments, ranging from rural communities to dense urban environments. The research community can and should be engaged in articulating grand challenges that […]

The Global Initiative to Enhance @scale and Distributed Computing and Analysis Technologies (GECAT) project at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) has two exciting new funding opportunities. The GECAT project is part of the National Science Foundation’s Science Across Virtual Institutes (SAVI) program and is an extension of the NSF-funded Blue Waters project, which provides access to one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers and enables investigators to conduct breakthrough computational and big data research. The first is to establish new International Virtual Research Organizations (IVRO) partnerships. NCSA is interested in soliciting proposals for new IVROs that will address and solve important challenges that either have been amplified or […]

CCC Director Ann Drobnis contributed to this blog post.  Last week we posted a blog about Health in Your Pocket: Diagnosing and Treating Disease with Smartphones, a press briefing that CCC members, Elizabeth (Beth) Mynatt, Shwetak Patel, and Gregory Hager presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advance of Science (AAAS) in early February. The focus of this post is on the Internet of Things (IoT). CCC Chair Beth Mynatt, CCC Executive Council Member Ben Zorn, and CCC Council Member Shwetak Patel were on a panel moderated by CCC Director Ann Drobnis on What Happens When Everyday Objects Become Internet Devices: A Science Policy Agenda. Mynatt began the presentation by asking […]

The National Science Foundation (NSF) recently announced that Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google, and Microsoft will participate in it’s new Critical Techniques, Technologies and Methodologies for Advancing Foundations and Applications of Big Data Sciences and Engineering (BIGDATA) research program. The three major cloud providers will supply cloud credits and resources to qualifying NSF-funded projects. This collaboration aims to combine cutting-edge, industry cloud computing resources with real data sets and assorted NSF-supported projects to advance research in big data and data science. Proposal submissions are due March 15, 2017 through March 22, 2017 (and no later than 5 p.m. submitter’s local time on March 22nd).  All those interested in submitting a […]