The following is a special contribution to this blog by Doug Burger, Director of Hardware, Devices, and Experiences at Microsoft Research. I served as a panelist at the White House National Strategic Computing Initiative Workshop (NSCI) on October 20-21. I took away a number of points about the consensus of the group that I thought worth sharing with the broader community. 1) It is clear that CMOS is coming to an end.  That was a striking consensus of the group, both on per-transistor costs and scaling. The semiconductor researchers are looking for extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV) to come online, although they’ve been struggling with it for 10 years, still don’t have […]

The following is a special contribution to this blog from the organizing committee of the National Science Foundation (NSF) workshop to Identify Interdisciplinary Data Science Approaches and Challenges to Enhance Understanding of Interactions of Food Systems with Energy and Water Systems — held during October 5-6, 2015 at the National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) Waterfront Centre in Washington, DC. This article summarizes some of the highlights of the workshop. In the coming decades, the world population is projected to grow significantly resulting in increased strains on the world’s limited food, energy, water and other natural resources. Furthermore, these strains may be amplified due to the effects of global climate change and increasing […]

The following is a special contribution to this blog by Jenn Wortman Vaughan, a senior researcher at Microsoft Research.   Social computing encompasses the mechanisms through which people interact with computational systems like crowdsourcing markets, ranking and recommendation systems, online prediction markets, citizen science projects, and collaboratively edited wikis. Humans are active participants in these systems, making choices that determine the systems’ input, and therefore output. The output of these systems can be viewed as a joint computation between humans and machines, and can be richer than what either could produce alone. Social computing is blossoming into a rich research area, with contributions from diverse disciplines including computer science, economics, […]

The Computing Community Consortium’s (CCC) is excited to release a report titled Quantification, Communication, and Interpretation of Uncertainty in Simulation and Data Science, the result of the Uncertainty in Computation Visioning Workshop, which was held in Washington DC in mid October.  The workshop brought together over 40 scientists from different disciplines including simulation and data science, engineering, statistics, applied mathematics, visualization, decision science and psychology. The overarching goal of the workshop was to open a discussion between experts with diverse scientific backgrounds about the topic of uncertainty/risk and its communication. Workshop participants identified significant shortcomings in the ways we currently process, present, and interpret uncertain data. Specific recommendations on a research agenda for the future were […]

The organizing committee for the Research Interfaces between Brain Science and Computer Science (BRAIN) have released their workshop report. This two-day workshop, sponsored by the Computing Community Consortium (CCC), brought together brain researchers and computer scientists for a scientific dialogue aimed at exposing new opportunities for joint research in the many exciting facets, established and new, of the interface between the two fields. Videos of the workshop presentations as well as the presentation slides are posted on the workshop website in the agenda. The reports suggests that the study of computing and the study of the brain interrelate in three ways, each suggesting a major research direction. First, the experimental study of brain architecture […]

The Privacy by Design four workshop series is well underway. With two workshops completed and two to come, the community engagement is high and the interest is continuing to grow. The first workshop, State of Research and Practice, was held in early February and the report can be found here. The second workshop, Privacy Enabling Design, was held in Atlanta, GA in early May. The report has now been released and a number of key insights came out of the two day discussion: Designers lack adequate heuristics to follow when designing applications that may affect users’ privacy. Users want modular privacy for different personal relationships. Designing for trust is a good framework, […]