The next WATCH talk, called Crypto Wars: Plus ça Change, Plus c’est la Même Chose is Thursday, April 21, 2016 from Noon-1pm EDT. The presenter will be Susan Landau, professor of Cybersecurity Policy in the Department of Social Science and Policy Studies at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Landau works at the intersection of cybersecurity, national security, law, and policy. During the Crypto Wars of the 1990s, her insights on how government encryption policy skewed civil society and business needs for security helped win the argument for a relaxation of cryptographic export controls. Beginning in the early 2000s, Landau was an early voice in the argument that law-enforcement requirements for embedding surveillance within […]

The National Science Foundation (NSF) Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) is pleased to announce a distinguished lecture on Wednesday, April 20, 2016 at 2:00pm EDT by Dr. Daniela Rus titled Pervasive Robots. Daniela Rus is a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at MIT. She is also a Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council Member. Rus’s research interests are in robotics, mobile computing, and data science. Rus is a Class of 2002 MacArthur Fellow, a fellow of ACM, AAAI and IEEE, and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. She earned her PhD in Computer […]

The 2016 Global City Teams Challenge (GCTC) Expo will take place in Austin, TX at the Austin Convention Center June 13-14, 2016. The Expo will showcase GCTC Action Clusters and will feature speakers and panelists on a wide range of smart city topics. The two-day event will include an exhibition space in which trade-show style booths will be made available to 2016 GCTC Action Clusters. If you would like to propose a new 2016 GCTC Action Cluster and would like to have the opportunity to present and exhibit at the 2016 GCTC Expo, please submit the following information by April 29, 2016: Project worksheet for the proposed Action Cluster A list […]

The 38th International Conference on Software Engineering 2016 (ICSE) — the premier conference in software engineering sponsored by ACM and IEEE CS — is coming to Austin, Texas for a second time in May 14 – 22, 2016. There, the top minds in software engineering research and practice will convene for a week of inspirational talks, demos and conversation. A quarter-century after the Texas state capital first hosted ICSE, Austin has become a hub for technology, entrepreneurship, music, outdoor recreation and nightlife.  Please mark your calendars and register for the conference here, the early registration deadline is Monday, April 04, 2016! An overview of the ICSE 2016 week is available here. Keynotes Speakers  Mary Shaw (Carnegie Mellon University, USA) Stephen Ibaraki (IFIP Global Industry […]

The following is a guest blog post from Ed Lazowska, Bill & Melinda Gates Chair in Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington and Founding Chair of the Computing Community Consortium (2007-2013).  The 2016 U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) job projections have recently been released, covering the decade 2014-2024. As in all recent BLS projections, computing occupations dominate STEM: computing occupations are projected to account for 73% of all newly-created STEM jobs during the decade (488,500 jobs), and 55% of all available STEM jobs, whether newly-created or available due to retirements (1,083,800 jobs over the decade). Of course, there are asterisks associated with any projection. And there are double asterisks associated […]

The following is a special contribution to this blog by CCC Executive Council Member Mark D. Hill of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. A key driver behind the amazing progress in computer performance and computer cost-performance has been Moore’s Law (doubling transistors per chip every two years) and Dennard Scaling (doing so at roughly constant power). Many have been warning that there are challenges with both and that new action is need to use transistors more efficiently. See for example the National Academies 2011 report “The Future of Computing Performance: Game Over or Next Level?” and the Computer Community Consortium 2012 white paper “21st Century Computer Architecture”. Intel has long been a contrarian […]