On Monday, the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) — together with the Computing Research Association’s (CRA) Government Affairs Committee — ran its first-ever Leadership in Science Policy Institute (LiSPI). Thirty-five computing researchers from around the country came to Washington to learn about U.S. science policy. Here, one of the participants — Beki Grinter, an Associate Professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech — shares her experiences in the daylong workshop. This past Monday I participated in the first CCC/CRA Leadership in Science Policy Institute in Washington, DC. The day was broken out into different sessions focused on how the Federal budgeting process works, how to connect to agencies like the Department of Energy, the National Institutes of […]

The Computing Community Consortium’s (CCC) latest Challenges & Visions track was held Nov. 3 at the 9th Annual IEEE Symposium on Safety, Security, and Rescue Robotics (SSRR) in Kyoto, Japan. The “outrageous visions for computing in rescue robotics” track was a success, expanding the awareness of computing for a less traditionally computational group — roboticists. (Previous tracks have been at conferences on spatial computing, databases, and operating systems.) SSRR is a single-track conference sponsored by the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society that attracts about 80 researchers and students from around the world in multiple disciplines: computer science, engineering, physics, and even medicine. The symposium focuses on stimulating meaningful conversations and demonstrations to […]

The following is a special contribution to this blog by Amy Apon, Chair of the Computer Science Division at Clemson University’s School of Computing. Apon attended the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) EarthCube Charette this week, and she recounts her experiences below. Earlier this week, the EarthCube community met at the first-ever EarthCube Charette in Washington, DC. EarthCube is a community process, with the goal of transforming the conduct of research by supporting the development of cyberinfrastructure that integrates data and information for knowledge management across the geosciences. EarthCube is supported jointly by the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Office of Cyberinfrastructure (OCI) and the Directorate for Geosciences (GEO). Already the EarthCube social networking website […]

This is a special contribution to this blog by Fred Roberts, director of the Center for Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science (DIMACS), and Stephen Greenfield, Professor of Mathematics and a member of the Graduate Faculty, at Rutgers. The pair organized a workshop entitled “U.S.-China Collaborations in Computer Science and Sustainability,” bringing together 45 U.S. and Chinese computer scientists, mathematicians, ecologists, and representatives from other disciplines for a two-day meeting Sept. 19-20 in Piscataway, NJ. The full program, including list of participants and talks, can be found here. In this post, Fred and Stephen summarize the workshop, including key findings. The Sept. 19-20 workshop at Rutgers followed a series of U.S.-China Computer Science Leadership Summits featuring leaders of […]

The following is a special contribution to this blog by Alan Neustadtl, Jennifer Preece, and Ben Shneiderman, faculty at the University of Maryland at College Park, as well as Marc Smith of the Connected Action Consulting Group. The four co-organized a Summer Social Webshop on Technology-Mediated Social Participation in College Park, MD, last Tuesday through Friday. Future leaders of social media research gathered at the University of Maryland at College Park Aug. 23-26 to hear from top researchers about Technology-Mediated Social Participation (TMSP), including the state of the art, emerging methodologies, and practical applications to national priorities. The Summer Social Webshop (@Webshop2011) — the result of a collaboration between the University of Maryland’s Human Computer Interaction Laboratory (HCIL), its College of […]

The NSF’s CISE Directorate has issued a Dear Colleague Letter (DCL), calling to attention the outputs of a multi-agency, invitational workshop on Cyber Security Data for Experimentation (CSDE). The workshop — which was held last year through the collaboration of the NSF, Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Office of Naval Research (ONR), and Treasury Department, as well as other Federal agencies — sought to find new ways for industrial partners to exchange relevant data with academic researchers. Academic, industry, and government participants engaged in spirited discussion and developed a deeper understanding of the issues involved in gaining access to industrial data sources and sharing research results based on those data…   One positive outcome […]