The Computing Innovation Fellows (CI Fellows) project, was a program that granted short-term postdoctoral fellowships to help keep recent graduates in the field during the economic downturn. Between 2009 and 2011, 127 PhD graduates in computer science and related fields were awarded  CI Fellowships. The program has ended and the former CI Fellows are now in the early years of their formal careers.   Computing Innovation Fellows (CI Fellows) from all three cohorts (2009, 2010, 2011) assembled on May 22-23 in San Francisco, CA to reflect on the success of the program and absorb information and advice from leaders in computing research. This was the first gathering of all three […]

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Information Innovation Office (I2O) hosted Demo Day 2014 to highlight DARPA’s ongoing contributions to preserving and expanding Information Technology superiority on May 21. The Pentagon event showcased the span of DARPA projects designed to change how the nation addresses growing national security challenges posed by the Information Revolution and by the increasing global availability of sophisticated information technologies.  Some of the projects on display were: DARPA Cyber Grand Challenge (CGC): CGC, to be launched this summer, will be the first-ever tournament for testing fully automatic network defense systems. The competition’s goal is to vastly improve the speed, scale and effectiveness of IT security against escalating cyber threats. High-Assurance […]

The following announcement is a special contribution from the National Science Foundation. Dear Colleague: How scientific research is conducted across all science disciplines is changing. One important direction of change is toward more open science, often driven by projects in which the output is purely digital, i.e., software or data. Scientists and engineers who develop software and generate data for their research spend significant time in the initial development of software or data frameworks, where they focus on the instantiation of a new idea, the widespread use of some infrastructure, or the evaluation of concepts for a new standard. Despite the growing importance of data and software products the effort […]

  The following is a special contribution to this blog by Limor Fix.  Limor recently retired from Intel, where she was the director of University Collaborative Research (UnCoR). UnCoR is the primary university-facing division of Intel Labs.  Limor is a member of the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council.  This week, in Washington DC, an exciting and highly energetic workshop focused on “Computing Visions 2025: Interacting with the Computers All Around Us”. This workshop was the first among several workshops planned for 2014, organized by a steering group of computing leaders drawn from the National Science Foundation (NSF) Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate Advisory Committee (CISE AC) and the Computing Community Consortium (CCC).  Successful […]

On May 15, the National Science Foundation (NSF) will host it’s next Washington Area Trustworthy Computing Hour (WATCH) talk. The talk will be “STAR-Vote – A Secure, Transparent, Auditable and Reliable Voting System.” The speaker will be Dan Wallach, professor in the Department of Computer Science and a Rice Scholar at the Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice University in Houston, Texas. From the abstract: STAR-Vote is a collaboration between a number of academics and the Travis County (Austin), Texas elections office, which currently uses a DRE voting system and previously used an optical scan voting system. STAR-Vote represents a rare opportunity for a variety of sophisticated technologies, such as end-to-end cryptography and […]

The National Science Foundation (NSF) Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) is pleased to announce a Distinguished Lecture on Monday, May 12, 2014 at 2:00 pm (EDT) by Dr. Erik Brynjolfsson titled The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies. Brynjolfsson is the Schussel Family Professor at the  MIT Sloan School of Management , Director of the MIT Center for Digital Business, Chair of the MIT Sloan Management Review, and the Editor of the Information Systems Network. His research and teaching focuses on how businesses can effectively use information technology in general and the Internet in particular. Abstract: We are at an inflection point in our economy.  A wave of exponential, digital and […]