The NSF Alan T. Waterman Award recognizes one extraordinary young scientist or engineer annually.   Candidates must be U.S. citizens or permanent residents and must be 35 years of age or younger or not more than 7 years beyond receipt of the Ph.D. degree by December 31 of the year in which they are nominated.  Nominations are due in early December. In the 30+ year history of this award, fewer than a half dozen computer scientists have been recognized.  A principal reason is we don’t nominate many people.  Let’s change that!  It’s too early to submit nominations, but it’s not too early to start thinking about who you’d be willing […]

Ellen Zegura is Professor and Chair of Computer Science at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She writes to us today in her role as chair of the NetSE Council. What is a “better Internet”? The current Internet has been a remarkable success, providing a platform for innovation that far exceeds its original vision as a research instrument. It is well documented that the Internet has transformed the lives of billions of people in areas as diverse as education, healthcare, entertainment and commerce. Yet many of these successes are threatened by the increasing sophistication of security attacks and the organizations that propagate them. A materially more secure Internet would be “better”. […]

The CCC-sponsored initiative in robotics, led by Henrik Christensen, has made great progress and provided a model example of a CCC initiative.  Having finished their series of workshops and developed a roadmap, they are now bringing targeted portions of that roadmap to NSF, NIST, DARPA, NIH and the Office of Science and Technology Policy.  They are also organizing a U.S. Congressional caucus on robotics to take place in March.  Additionally several companies have expressed an interest in engaging in a broader effort on robotics across United States. Back in early 2008, they began organizing four workshops, one each in four topical areas of robotics: manufacturing and logistics, healthcare and medical robotics, […]

An op-ed by the University of Washington’s Ed Lazowska and Sun Microsystems’ Bob Sproull appears today on the website of Scientists and Engineers for America.  They write: “Congress is now debating the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. Included in this package is over 10 billion dollars for science facilities, research, and instrumentation. “The reason for this inclusion is simple: today’s research is tomorrow’s infrastructure. “When our nation faces immediate challenges, the feasible solutions depend upon the ideas, resources, and designs that are “on the shelf,” ready to deploy … “Increasingly, information technology is the cornerstone of America’s infrastructure. Today’s information technology research is a cornerstone of tomorrow’s infrastructure.” […]

This new DoD S&T video is absolutely worth 4:56 of your time! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_lLDNosedHk It’s inspirational. — Ed Lazowska

In a November 4 post, we asked your help in identifying game-changing advances from computing research conducted in the past 20 years.  We primed the pump with four examples: The Internet and the World Wide Web as we know them today Search technology – Where once we filed, today we search Cluster computing The transformation of science via computation In this post, we summarize just a sample of your additions (we have grabbed text from your posted comments, without a lot of editing, so this will be loose – “it’s the thoughts that count”) and invite your further comments – cleaning up these additions, or providing others.  Please let us hear […]