On November 13, the National Science Foundation (NSF) will host it’s next Washington Area Trustworthy Computing Hour (WATCH) talk. The talk will be “The burden of authentication: What friction points reveal.” The speaker will be Dana Chisnell, from the Center for Civic Design. From the abstract: Everyone whines about dealing with passwords and authentication, but what is the real cost to individual users? In a study conducted with 23 people at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, we asked participants to tell us about every time they authenticated in a 24-hour period. From this, we learned that the friction of authentication goes beyond the specific act of authenticating, spilling over into tasks, productivity, and […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is releasing its third segment in the Computing Research in Action Series.   This segment features the Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp) research lab, led by Professor Shwetak Patel, at the University of Washington. The UbiComp lab, which consists of an interdisciplinary team of students (CS, EE, CE, ME), focuses on solving interesting and socially meaningful problems using a mix of hardware and software applications. The UbiComp lab focuses on four areas of ubiquitous computing: Novel interaction techniques: With the growing number of computers around us embedded into the environment, there is a need to interact with these computers beyond the traditional keyboard and mouse. Sustainability  sensing: Using computer science, machine learning and signal processing […]

To help mark the 60th anniversary of its Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP), the National Science Foundation (NSF) has announced a new video contest — “Creating the Future” — that challenges Fellows to create short videos, not to exceed 90 seconds each, communicating how their NSF-funded research will help shape the future for themselves, for their field, or for the world. Submissions are due by Sept. 14, 2012, and winners — to be selected by a panel of judges as well as the broader public for a “People’s Choice” award category — will be announced in mid-November. First place carries a $2,000 cash prize. According to the contest website (following the link):

The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is holding its A.M. Turing Centenary Celebration in San Francisco, CA, today and Saturday — marking the 100th anniversary of Alan Turing’s birth by bringing together 33 living Turing Award winners for the first time, and raising awareness of Turing, reflecting on his contributions, and discussing the fundamental importance of computing and computer science. The event, which kicks off at 12pm EDT this afternoon, will be streamed live via the web. Over 1,000 in-person attendees are expected. As Vint Cerf, the General Chair for the celebration and himself the 2004 ACM Turing Award winner, writes (following the link):

As we described in this space yesterday, this morning at an event at the White House, the Obama Administration will formally launch the US Ignite Broadband Initiative, an at-scale, nationwide innovation ecosystem for developing and deploying public sector applications and services on ultra-high-speed, software-defined networks. The announcement will be streamed live beginning at 9am EDT — and we’ll cover it below (more after the jump…).

The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) — together with the Case Foundation and the Joyce Foundation — is hosting an event Tuesday on Public Sector Prizes, seeking to further understand the role of incentive prizes and challenges in the public sector — and to catalyze future initiatives in this space. A portion of the event will be streamed live via the web for those interested. According to an OSTP announcement (following the link):