Contributions to this post were provided by Andrew Ko, University of Washington. Andrew J. Ko is an Associate Professor at the University of Washington Information School and an Adjunct Associate Professor in Computer Science and Engineering. His research focuses on interactions between people and code, spanning the areas of human-computer interaction, software engineering, and more recently computing education. Ko maintains a blog called Bits and Behavior in which he muses “about software and the world’s attempt to understand it.” A recent blog post, however, was a little more personal and talked about his transition from studying developer tools and productivity to “shaping how developers (and developers-in-training) learn and shape their […]

The following is a guest blog by Greg Hager, Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Chair and Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University.  Computing has become a powerful tool for productivity and connectivity — it powers companies, it fuels scientific research, and it delivers entertainment and social engagement for billions. Could research-based innovations in computing also become a catalyst for addressing compelling societal problems? To explore this question, the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) organized a two-day Symposium on Computing Research: Addressing National Priorities and Societal Needs. This meeting brought together over 130 in-person participants and over 1000 online viewers to raise the visibility of work that connects […]

The AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellows at the National Science Foundation (NSF) have organized another talk in their Data Science Seminar Series from Bill Vass on DevOps at Amazon: A Look at Our Tools and Processes. The talk will be tomorrow, Tuesday, June 21, 2016 from 3:30PM-4:30PM EDT. Bill Vass, Vice President of Engineering at Amazon Web Services, where he oversees the team working on Amazon S3 Object Storage Service, Amazon Glacier, Simple Queuing Service, Simple Work Flow, Auto Scaling, Messaging, Transactional Systems, and Kinesis Streaming Services. With these projects, the Storage Services team runs the largest software defined storage system in the world, which is used by web-based companies, consumer companies, […]

Imagine diagnosing a hospital patient with septicemia 25 hours before the onset of sepsis shock, dispatching the right police officer to de-escalate a situation, or increasing agricultural productivity based on weather knowledge where few weather stations exist. These scenarios are not simply dreams, but thanks to artificial intelligence (AI) research are actually happening in the world today and are having a positive impact on societies across the globe. Interest in artificial intelligence has been rapidly increasing in recent years, often with a focus on the flashy robot or computer that can speak responses, but the practical applications have a major societal impact and are often overlooked. AI has been successfully applied to societal […]

The following is a guest blog by Greg Hager, Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Chair and Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University.  I recently had the opportunity to participate in a panel discussing the National Robotics Initiative (NRI). The NRI is in its 5th year, so we were asked to describe “the return on investment” of the program. Various panel members pointed out how focused and energized robotics is on high-value, relevant applications, and how it has created new startups, a new cohort of students who will power the next wave of R&D innovation, and, of course, a host of new research results. But what does this really […]

In celebration of the fifth anniversary of the National Robotics Initiative (NRI), the Congressional Robotics Caucus Advisory Committee including IEEE-USA, Computing Research Association, Carnegie Mellon University, and Georgia Tech with support from the National Science Foundation (NSF) held a Congressional Briefing with demonstrations and the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) released it’s report called Next Generation Robotics. The NRI was a direct result of a CCC roadmapping effort led by Henrik Christensen of Georgia Tech. It is based on a definitive report, A Roadmap for US Robotics — From Internet to Robotics, developed by more than 100 robotics experts from industry and academia who in 2008 attended four CCC workshops, one in each four topic areas of robotics: manufacturing and logistics, healthcare and medical robotics, service robotics, and emerging technologies. The goal of the NRI is to “accelerate […]