The White House is currently accepting applications for the second round of the Presidential Innovation Fellows (PIF) program. The program pairs top innovators from the private sector, non-profits and academia with top innovators in government to collaborate during six-to-12 month “tours-of-duty” that aim to save lives, save taxpayer money and fuel job creation. Applications will be accepted through March 17, 2013. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) expects to host three of the nine new Presidential Innovation Fellow Projects.   Two of the fellows will work on Cyber-Physical Systems. Cyber-Physical Systems refers to the convergence of networking and information technology with engineered physical systems to create a new generation of […]

In “The Explosive Growth of Postdocs in Computer Science,” a VIEWPOINT article in Communications of the ACM, CCC Council member Anita Jones analyzes trends that have accompanied the increase of CS postdocs in recent years. “The dramatic increase in postdocs changes the overall balance in the number of participants of different kinds in the academic research enterprise, that is the number of tenure-track faculty, graduate students, research faculty, teaching faculty, and postdocs. What effect does that have on other members of the enterprise?   When a recently graduated Ph.D. moves to a new research project, that person brings fresh ideas and even different assumptions about research. It is possible that a rapidly flowing […]

Martha Pollack, University of Michigan Professor of EECS and past Dean of their School of Information, has been selected as Michigan’s next Provost. This is another sign of the increasing influence of computer scientists in leadership positions at forward-looking universities:  Stanford (John Hennessy, President), Harvey Mudd (Maria Klawe, President), MIT (Eric Grimson, Chancellor), now Michigan. Congratulations Martha! Read more here.

Big Data could revolutionize healthcare by replacing up to 80% of what doctors do while still maintaining over 91% accuracy. Please take a look at the infographic below to learn more.  

Four computer scientists have received the film industry’s highest honor, an Academy Award, for their technical achievement in special effects. The researchers – Theodore Kim (UCSB), Nils Thuerey (Scanline VFX), Markus Gross (ETH Zurich), and Doug James (Cornell) –  developed a software algorithm called Wavelet Turbulence, and they expect it to have applications beyond entertainment in other disciplines such as medicine and aerospace. The innovative software algorithm generates realistic swirling smoke and fiery explosions that are more detailed, easier to control and faster to create than previous technology, and it has been used in more than two dozen recent movies in the past few years.   “As a scientist and a […]

In recent years, interest has been growing in the emerging interdisciplinary area of Human Computation, a field that explores principles and applications around giving computing systems programmatic access to human intellect to perform some aspect of computation, whether involving individuals or groups of people (“the crowd”). The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) Conference on Human Computation and Crowdsourcing (HCOMP-2013) will bring several fields together in the first major academic conference on this topic. The conference will take place November 7-9, 2013 in Palm Springs, California. The paper submission deadline is May 1, and there will also be workshops, tutorials, posters, and demonstrations. Eric Horvitz, from Microsoft Research, past president of AAAI, and a current Computing Community […]