On April 2, the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council kicked off its spring Council meeting with a discussion with Vint Cerf, Google’s Chief Internet Evangelist, on the challenges of the “Internet of Things” (IoT), such as the connection of everyday items like lightbulbs, refrigerators, TVs, and other devices to both the internet and each other. The rapidly increasing numbers of networked devices brings up a number of  issues that the computing community will need to address in the near future. Cerf delivered an engaging presentation on his view of IoT and followed it up with a thought provoking dialogue with the CCC Council about some of the challenges that this […]

On April 3, 2014, Farnam Jahanian, Assistant Director at the National Science Foundation (NSF) for the Computer & Information Science & Engineering (CISE) Directorate, released the following letter to the community: Dear Colleagues,   I am delighted to announce the appointment of Ms. Irene Qualters to the position of Division Director, Division of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure (ACI), effective April 6, 2014. In this role, Irene will lead ACI in its mission to support and coordinate the prototyping, development, acquisition, and provisioning of state-of-the-art cyberinfrastructure resources, tools, and services essential to the advancement and transformation of science and engineering.   Over the past several years, Irene has provided significant leadership in managing NSF’s investments […]

Today, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) announced the launch of a new office that will merge biology, engineering, and computer science to harness the power of natural systems for national security. The Biological Technologies Office (BTO), a new division, will explore the increasingly dynamic intersection of biology and the physical sciences. BTO will expand the work undertaken by DARPA’s Defense Sciences (DSO) and Microsystems Technology (MTO) Offices. From the press release on the DARPA site: The Biological Technologies Office will advance and expand on a number of earlier DARPA programs that made preliminary inroads into the bio-technological frontier,” said Geoff Ling, named by DARPA Director Arati Prabhakar to be the first director of […]

This is a guest post by Will Barkis, PhD. Will is a Gigabit Evangelist and, until recently, led Mozilla’s gigabit innovation efforts for the past two years as Project Lead and “Gigabit Developer Evangelist” on the Mozilla Ignite Challenge and subsequently as Director of the Gigabit Community Fund. Before Mozilla, he worked on computer & information science & engineering policy at the National Science Foundation for two years, helping launch the US Ignite Initiative with a team at NSF and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and working on a number of tech policy issues. He can be reached at @willbarkis; wbarkis [at] gmail. The gigabit future is here Gigabit-per-second networks are rolling out around […]

A middle school student who used computer science to develop a hundred million dollar cost savings plan for the government was featured in an article on CNN.com, “Teen to government: Change your typeface, save millions.” Suvir Mirchandani, 14, was thinking of ways to cut waste and save money at his middle school. He noticed there had been a movement to recycle and use double-sided printing, but what about the ink (which is expensive) on all those pages. Interested in applying computer science to promote environmental sustainability, Suvir decided he was going to figure out if there was a better way to minimize the constant flurry of paper and ink. … […]

As reported in today’s New York Times, the Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC) announced their formation today as an open membership group to further the development, adoption and widespread use of interconnected devices, intelligent analytics, and people, namely The Internet of Things. The IIC’s charter will be to encourage innovation by: Utilizing existing and creating new industry use cases and test beds for real-world applications; Delivering best practices, reference architectures, case studies, and standards requirements to ease deployment of connected technologies; Influencing the global standards development process for Internet and industrial systems; Facilitating open forums to share and exchange real-world ideas, practices, lessons, and insights; Building confidence around new and innovative approaches to […]