On January 14, 2014, Roger Dingledine will present at the next Washington Area Trustworthy Computing Hour (WATCH). His talk is will be on “The Tor Project in 2013.” Abstract Tor is a free-software anonymizing network that helps people around the world use the Internet in safety. Tor’s 5500 volunteer relays carry traffic for around a million daily users, including ordinary citizens who want protection from identity theft and prying corporations, corporations who want to look at a competitor’s website in private, people around the world whose Internet connections are censored, and even governments and law enforcement. The last year has included major cryptographic upgrades in the Tor software, dozens of research […]

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has issued a new solicitation for the Exploiting Parallelism and Scalability (XPS) program.  The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) 2012 White Paper “21st Century Computer Architecture” was a key driver for the development of this program. The Exploiting Parallelism and Scalability (XPS) program aims to support groundbreaking research leading to a new era of parallel computing. Achieving the needed breakthroughs will require a collaborative effort among researchers representing all areas– from services and applications down to the micro-architecture– and will be built on new concepts, theories, and foundational principles. New approaches to achieve scalable performance and usability need new abstract models and algorithms, new programming models and languages, new […]

Update January 6, 2014: This event has been cancelled due to weather.  The National Science Foundation (NSF) Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) is pleased to announce a Distinguished Lecture on Monday, January 6, 2014 at 12:00 pm (EST) titled Designing Disruptive Learning Technologies.  This lecture is sponsored by the Cyberlearning: Transforming Education Working Group. Professor Tom Moher of the University of Illinois at Chicago, will showcase his designs for using “embedded phenomena” to bring the field into the classroom and foster learning from those experiences. Using RoomQuake, 4th and 5th graders experience earthquakes, find their epicenters, and calculate their magnitude and intensity. RoomBugs and WallScopes simulate dynamic […]

The following is a special contribution to this blog by Shay Cohen. Cohen was a 2011-2013 Computing Innovation Fellow (CIFellow) at Columbia University. He is now a Chancellor’s Fellow in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. When I finished my graduate studies and defended my thesis at Carnegie Mellon in September 2011, I had already started my position at Columbia as a CIFellow with Michael Collins. It was actually not too long before my defense that I heard about being awarded a CIFellowship. It was a great relief to learn this — I had already heard from a few other previous-year CIFellows that the program is great and […]

On December 30, 2013, John Markoff wrote an article in The New York Times, titled Viewing Where the Internet Goes.  He takes a brief look back at what happened with the internet in 2013, primarily related to Edward Snowden and asks the two creators of the internet, Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn for their views of how the internet might change going forward. The contrasts of the internet and related policies are stated clearly, It was, for example, the Internet’s global reach that made classified documents available to Mr. Snowden — and made it so easy for him to distribute them to news organizations. Yet the Internet also made possible […]

The National Academies Board on Mathematical Sciences and their Applications is sponsoring a workshop on Training Students to Extract Value from Big Data, hosted by the Committee on Applied and Theoretical Statistics of the National Research Council of the National Academies. What are the key principles of a big data curriculum? How can big data courses serve an interdisciplinary audience? What are the best resources for students?   These and other questions will be addressed in a series of presentations and discussions. You can view the proposed workshop agenda here.  The workshop will be held April 11-12, 2014 in Washington, DC and is free and open to the public, both in person and […]