In his major address on immigration policy on July 1, President Barack Obama noted: “And while we provide students from around the world visas to get engineering and computer science degrees at our top universities, our laws discourage them from using those skills to start a business or power a new industry right here in the United States. Instead of training entrepreneurs to create jobs on our shores, we train our competition.” Read the full text here.

I notice that CACM Editor-in-Chief Moshe Vardi’s letter in the July 2010 issue of CACM speaks to what he calls “Hypercriticality,” and cites my post of May 4 here on the CCC Blog. (You can find Moshe’s letter in CACM vol. 53, no. 7, p. 5; if you are logged into the CACM website, you can find it here.) Moshe appears to agree that we in the computing research community are often too harsh when reviewing one another’s work. (Contributed by John Leslie King, University of Michigan)

Ken Jennings, the man known for his record-breaking streak of 74 consecutive wins and $2.52 million in earnings on the popular TV quiz show Jeopardy! back in 2004, may have some competition on his hands. This Sunday’s New York Times Magazine contains an incredibly fascinating expose about “Watson,” an advanced “question answering” machine that IBM researchers have been busy developing for the past half-decade.  The story provides a step-by-step account of the challenges and research advances underlying Watson’s development — including a detailed description of how Watson works today.  It chronicles early wins — and, notably, losses — for the supercomputer versus real-life former Jeopardy! contests.  And it describes ways in which natural language processing and data mining advances […]

Please see the new NSF/CISE FY11 cross-cutting program, Smart Health and Wellbeing, which we announced on Friday, June 11: http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2010/nsf10575/nsf10575.htm. We are looking for your great ideas for how advances in computer and information science and engineering can transform the nature and conduct of healthcare and wellness as we know it today. (Contributed by Jeannette Wing, Assistant Director for NSF/CISE)

On May 4 I posted a short message titled “Fratricide and the Ecology of Proposal Reviews.”  That was an effort to focus attention on an issue.  This post provides a suggestion for computing researchers when dealing with work that seems unfamiliar or difficult to understand. Computing is a “general purpose” phenomenon.  It can be applied to many things, which brings heterogeneous communities to the discussion.  The computing research field has porous boundaries, making it an intellectual watering hole.  This offers stimulation and excitement, but it can cause problems.  People from different fields follow different conventions for doing or explaining their work.  Philipe van Parijs has addressed this as Clarity and […]

“There is a variety of mechanisms through which the research community can participate in agenda-setting. One model I have found to be very valuable is exemplified by the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) … “CCC has played an important role in identifying and promoting exciting “visions” for the future of Information Technology (IT) research — ideas that have the potential to attract the best and brightest to the field, drive economic growth, and address national challenges in areas such as health, energy, and education … “These papers and workshop reports have had a clear influence on Administration budget and recruiting decisions and have already sparked collaborations between government, industry, and academia. […]