Eminent computer scientist Bill Wulf, who has been a leader by example for so many years in so many ways, has resigned from the University of Virginia to protest the recent conduct of the UVa Board of Visitors in removing President Teresa Sullivan. Wulf’s letter to newly-appointed Interim President Carl P. Zeithaml, reported in the Washington Post, states: “By this email I am submitting my resignation, effective immediately  …  A BOV that so poorly understands UVa, and academic culture more generally, is going to make a lot more dumb decisions  …  frankly, I think you should be ashamed to be party to this debacle! “I urge my fellow faculty to […]

The computing research community lost a wonderful researcher, colleague, and friend last week. David L. Waltz, whose extraordinary contributions and service to the field included a term as member of the CCC Council during the founding years, passed away on Thursday. The New York Times‘s John Markoff has written an excellent tribute: David L. Waltz, a computer scientist whose early research in information retrieval provided the foundation for today’s Internet search engines, died on Thursday in Princeton, N.J. He was 68.   The cause was brain cancer, his wife, Bonnie Waltz, said. He died at the University Medical Center at Princeton.   During his career as a teacher and a technologist at […]

On November 15, seven University of Washington faculty members from Biology, Bioengineering, and Computer Science & Engineering were privileged to share a 2-hour breakfast in Seattle with DARPA Director Regina Dugan, Deputy Director Ken Gabriel, IIO Office Director Dan Kaufman, IIO Program Manager Ben Cutler, and U.S. Marines Operational Liaison Col. Robert Durkin. One message that came through loud and clear:  DARPA leadership is intently focused on understanding how well DARPA is working in the eyes of the academic research community.  There were many probing questions exploring the details of interactions and relationships. Talk to your DARPA Program Manager was emphasized repeatedly.  For example, in order to allow headquarters staff […]

We’ve talked about the notion of hypercriticality in computer science in this space before (see here and here), and now Jeannette M. Wing — the former National Science Foundation (NSF) Assistant Director for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) and current Department Head of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University — has written about it with some hard numbers over on the Communications of the ACM Blog: Are computer scientists hypercritical? Are we more critical than scientists and engineers in other disciplines? Bertrand Meyer’s August 22, 2011 The Nastiness Problem in Computer Science blog post partially makes the argument referring to secondhand information from the [NSF]. Here are some NSF numbers to back the claim that we are hypercritical. […]

The NSF’s CISE Directorate today announced the appointment of Cynthia Dion-Schwarz as the Deputy Assistant Director, effective Sept. 12: Dr. Dion-Schwarz will be joining us from the Department of Defense (DoD), where she served as the Director of Information Systems & Cyber Security Research in the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering. In this position, she was responsible for the strategic oversight of the science and technology research in Information Technologies and for serving as the program executive for research programs in tactical networked communications, software initiatives, cyber security, and high performance computing. She also served as the DoD representative to the Networking and Information Technology […]

Today’s New York Times reports on a Stanford AI course that will be available online and has already attracted nearly 60,000 students.