There’s an interesting article in the March 2011 issue of the Communications of the ACM about “why computer scientists should come out from ‘behind the scenes’ more often and work with the media to draw public attention to their fundamental innovation“ — and just how we can begin to do that: Science communication or public outreach can be seen as taking a lot of time and effort compared to the payoffs it provides. In effect, there’s a tragedy of the commons—we all benefit from those who do it, so there is incentive to let other people shoulder the load.   The rationale behind science communication is fairly obvious, and it is difficult to […]

Last Wednesday, the NSF announced the second round of an international grant competition designed to spur cutting-edge research in the humanities and social sciences.  Called the “Digging into Data Challenge,” the competition specifically promotes large-scale, international and interdisciplinary analysis of large data sets in these fields. The competition asks interested scholars to design methods and tools to analyze large data sets associated with a million books, or a million pages of newspaper, or a million songs, for example. The announcement follows a successful trial round last year amongst teams of humanities experts, social scientists, and computer and information scientists.  This year, a total of 8 research funders are involved, with the […]

As we’ve previously blogged here, the CCC has sponsored three Challenges & Visions Sessions at computing research conferences over the past year, seeking to give time and attention to “wacky ideas” that may not otherwise make it through a conference’s normal reviewing process.  These sessions — run on an experimental basis, to assess their value to the conferences as well as the broader research community — have been quite successful in elevating promising visions and generating vigorous discussions.  Consequently, the CCC is announcing today a call for additional Challenges & Visions Sessions: The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is sponsoring an initiative to bring special “Challenges and Visions” tracks to leading computer […]

Keith Marzullo, a Division Director within the NSF’s CISE Directorate, recently sat down to describe his experiences working at the National Science Foundation. “As a Division Director of [Computer and Network Systems] — CNS — I have a very broad view of what now is going on in research in my area. I’m going to conferences I never went to, because it’s now my job to understand what’s going on — and it’s really exciting. I’m getting a birds-eye view of everything that’s going on in the nation in terms of research in computer networks and computer systems. I wish I had done this 10 years ago. I think, had […]

The Free/Open Source Software workshop wrapped up today.  Discussion focused on a number of topics, including: – Translation into other domains of software – Software engineering practice – Collaboration issues in FOSS – Learning and education challenges/opportunities – Evolution of products, projects, practices and processes – Research infrastructures A report from the workshop will be developed in the coming weeks and posted on the CCC Web site. John L. King, CCC Council Liaison

The attendees at the CCC-supported workshop on Free/Open Source Software met today at UC Irvine’s Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences to work in break-out groups on a refined classification scheme for open-source software development.   The group will work tomorrow morning to synthesize the results of today’s efforts into elements that can be reported out. John L. King, CCC Council liaison