The Computer Science and Telecommunications Board (CSTB) released a new National Academies report, At the Nexus of Cybersecurity and Public Policy: Some Basic Concepts and Issues. As we as a nation become more dependent on information and information technology, cybersecurity is becoming increasingly important.  The report highlights 6 key findings about cybersecurity and public policy: Cybersecurity is a never-ending battle, and a permanently decisive solution to the problem will not be found in the forseeable future. Improvements to the cybersecurity posture of individuals, firms, government agencies, and the nation have considerable value in reducing the loss and damage that may be associated with cybersecurity breachers. Improvements to cybersecurity call for two distinct […]

In January, President Obama asked for a comprehensive review of policy issues on big data and privacy during his speech on signals intelligence.  As a part of the comprehensive review, the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) was asked to examine the topic.  PCAST setup a working group, co-chaired by Members William Press and Susan Graham, who is also the Chair of the Computing Community Consortium (CCC).  The working group has reviewed the technical literature, consulted with experts, and engaged with the broader community of social scientists and law for perspective to produce a report titled Big Data and Privacy: A Technological Perspective. The Report highlights five recommendations: […]

The following is a special contribution to this blog by Jessica Cundiff, Research Analyst with CRA’s Center for Evaluating the Research Pipeline (CERP).  As part of the CERP team, she helps evaluate the effectiveness of programs aimed toward increasing gender and racial diversity in computing fields. CRA’s Center for Evaluating the Research Pipeline has published their Evaluation Report of the Computing Community Consortium’s (CCC) Computing Innovation (CI) Fellowship Program. The CI Fellows Program was funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and implemented by CCC to provide recent computing PhDs with a valuable postdoctoral opportunity that would foster long-term success as computing researchers, during the economic downturn. To provide comparative evaluation of the […]

The following is a special contribution to this blog by Josep Torrellas, Professor at the Departments of Computer Science and (by courtesy) Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the Director of the Center for Programmable Extreme Scale Computing, and the Director of the Illinois-Intel Parallelism Center (I2PC).  Josep is a member of the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council.  As part of the CCC’s ongoing support of visioning workshops, Alex Jones (University of Pittsburgh), Iris Bahar (Brown University), Srinivas Katkoori (University of South Florida), Patrick Madden (SUNY Binghamton), Diana Marculescu (Carnegie Mellon University), and Igor Markov (University of Michigan) have co-organized three workshops on Charting the Future […]

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has announced three additional funding opportunities focused on training under the Big Data to Knowledge (BD2K) Initiative.  The BD2K Initiative is a new major trans-NIH initiative that aims to support advances in data science, other quantitative sciences, policy, and training that are needed for the effective use of Big Data in biomedical research. The new funding opportunities are: Predoctoral Training in Biomedical Big Data Science: The purpose of this Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) is to solicit applications for graduate training programs in Big Data Science, for the expressed purpose of training the next generation of scientists who will develop computational and quantitative approaches and tools needed by the biomedical research community […]

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has revamped the Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) Program.  It is now called the National Science Foundation Research Traineeship (NRT) Program.  Like IGERT, NRT programs are supposed to develop graduate STEM training programs which will give students the skills, knowledge and competencies needed for a full range of STEM careers.  One key feature of the new program is the specific focus on Data Enabled Science and Engineering.  From the announcement: The NRT program initially has one priority research theme – Data-Enabled Science and Engineering (DESE); in addition, proposals are encouraged on any other crosscutting, interdisciplinary theme. In either case, proposals should identify the alignment of project research […]