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.

… and a shout-out early in Stephen Colbert’s hilarious commencement address. Congratulations Barbara!  Watch Colbert’s remarks here.

I’ve been interacting with the international press quite a bit with the spate of disasters in Japan and here in the US. I’m thrilled with the “where are the robots?” questions for a couple of reasons. First, there’s the Sally Fields effect- they like robots! Finally, I was getting tired of hearing about the Terminator and robot uprisings. Second, I get to point that out that there is a set of land, sea, and marine vehicles sufficiently hardened to be of use- while putting in a pitch for the government to fund acquisition. (But no worries, these robots are the first generation and need lots of improvements and fundamental research […]

It’s unusual for computing research to be featured in an editorial in the New York Times, but it happened today:   An editorial in today’s New York Times follows up on an article ten days ago describing an end-to-end analysis of the spam value chain which determined that 95% of spam-advertised pharmaceutical, replica and software products are monetized using merchant services from just a handful of banks. The New York Times editorial states:  “The Times’s John Markoff reported that computer scientists at two University of California campuses have found another vulnerability:  spammers’ banks.  To track the flow of information, the researchers made hundreds of purchases.  Buying Viagra from the Pharmacy Express […]