Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Northwestern University have conducted a study and found that moving common applications to the cloud can save significant amounts of energy.  The study is summarized in this report.  According to Scientific Computing, “The report looks at three common business applications – email, customer relationship management software, or CRM, and bundled productivity software (spreadsheets, file sharing, word processing, etc.). Moving these software applications from local computer systems to centralized cloud services could cut information technology energy consumption by up to 87 percent – about 23 billion kilowatt-hours. This is roughly the amount of electricity used each year by all the homes, businesses and industry in […]

Yesterday, Microsoft announced their Microsoft Research Faculty Fellowships and former Computing Innovation Fellow, Katrina Ligett is one of only seven recipients.  As Microsoft says, The time for new faculty members to take risks in research is early in their careers. However, early-career realities often get in the way. As any tenure-track academic knows, the first few years of one’s career can be a seemingly endless process of writing grant proposals. The Microsoft Research Faculty Fellowships liberate promising young researchers from this task, allowing them the freedom to conduct research to advance computer science in bold new directions with minimal distractions. Katrina was a member of the first cohort of Computing […]

Cameron Wilson, long-time Director of Public Policy for ACM, has been given a special assignment for 12 months to work at Code.org as Chief Operating Officer and Vice President of Government Relations. Code.org was founded by Seattle tech entrepreneur Hadi Partovi to create, launch, and lead a new initiative for scaling K-12 computer science education.  A phenomenal video produced as part of the launch attracted widespread attention.  Today, 9 out of 10 schools nationwide don’t offer computer science; in 40 states, computer science does not count towards math or science graduation requirements; the NCAA doesn’t consider computer science as an academic credit for aspiring student-athletes; the recent National Research Council “Framework […]

Yesterday the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) of Japan signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU), facilitating a partnership on research in networking technology and systems enabling future Internet/new-generation networks. The NSF issued a press release on the event: This MOU follows the third Director General-level meeting of the U.S.-Japan Policy Cooperation Dialogue on the Internet Economy held in Tokyo, Japan, in March 2012, at which U.S. and Japanese researchers articulated the need for research and development into a new architecture enabling more robust and evolvable future Internet design.   As part of these discussions, three topics of mutual interest emerged: optical […]

Steve Lohr reports in the New York Times: “A new report from the McKinsey Global Institute, the research arm of the consulting firm … not only selects a dozen ‘disruptive’ technologies from a candidate list of 100, but also measures their economic impact. “By 2025, the 12 technologies … have the potential to deliver economic value of up to $33 trillion a year worldwide, according to the McKinsey researchers.” The top six on the list: Mobile internet Automation of knowledge work Internet of Things Cloud Advanced Robotics Autonomous and near-autonomous vehicles As we have opined before, “All computer science, all the time …” Read the New York Times article here.

Earlier this month, Gil Press of Forbes wrote A Very Short History Of Big Data.  The history in this article begins in 1944, but jumps every few years until 2008, when it seems Big Data hit the big time. The impact of efforts by the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) in that time frame were noted by Forbes, as they had previously been by the New York Times.  Both highlighted a CCC white paper co-authored by Randal Bryant (CMU), Randy Katz (UC Berkeley), and Ed Lazowska (University of Washington), “Big-Data Computing: Creating Revolutionary Breakthroughs in Commerce, Science, and Society.” Big Data has been a major theme of CCC’s over the years.  […]