Computing Community Consortium Blog

The goal of the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is to catalyze the computing research community to debate longer range, more audacious research challenges; to build consensus around research visions; to evolve the most promising visions toward clearly defined initiatives; and to work with the funding organizations to move challenges and visions toward funding initiatives. The purpose of this blog is to provide a more immediate, online mechanism for dissemination of visioning concepts and community discussion/debate about them.

Learn more about the USDA/NIFA Food and Agriculture Cyber-infrastructure and Tools (FACT) Initiative!

June 25th, 2018 / in Announcements, research horizons, Research News / by Helen Wright

Recently, the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) posted about the USDA/NIFA Food and Agriculture Cyber-infrastructure and Tools (FACT) initiative.  Check out this webinar about FACT on Wednesday, June 27th at 2PM ET.  FACT seeks to catalyze activities that harness big data for synthesizing new knowledge, making predictive decisions, and fostering data-supported innovation in agriculture. Projects funded through FACT will work to examine the value of data for small and large farmers, agricultural and food industries, and gain an understanding of how data can impact the agricultural supply chain, reduce food waste and loss, improve consumer health, environmental and natural resource management, affect the structure of U.S. food and agriculture sectors, and increase U.S. competitiveness. The webinar will […]

ACM SIGARCH Blog- Verifying Quantum Software and Hardware

June 19th, 2018 / in research horizons, Research News / by Helen Wright

The following is a blog post from the ACM SIGARCH Computer Architecture Today. The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) has also done work in the quantum computing (QC) space, including hosting a recent workshop called Next Steps in Quantum Computing: Computer Science’s Role. The workshop brought together an interdisciplinary crowd of colleagues from classical computer science disciplines as well as domain-experts from quantum computing. It addressed the huge gap between problems for which a quantum computer might be useful (such as chemistry problems, material science problems, etc) and what we can currently build, program, and run. The goal of the QC research community, as is briefly mentioned in the blog below, is to close the gap so […]

NIH Releases Strategic Plan for Data Science

June 18th, 2018 / in Announcements, Research News / by Helen Wright

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) recently released the following letter to the community announcing its Strategic Plan for Data Science.  Dear Colleagues, The National Institutes of Health (NIH) released its first-ever Strategic Plan for Data Science to capitalize on the opportunities presented by advances in data science.  The plan describes NIH’s overarching goals, strategic objectives, and implementation tactics for promoting the modernization of the NIH-funded biomedical data science ecosystem. We are grateful for the input from the community and the public received from the Request for Information, which was incorporated into the final plan. Over the course of the next year, NIH will begin implementing its strategy, with some elements of the […]

The Surprising Security Benefits of End-to-End Formal Proofs

June 13th, 2018 / in research horizons / by Khari Douglas

The following is a guest blog post by Adam Chlipala, associate professor of computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Many discussions of computer security adopt metaphors from war or biology. There is an arms race between attackers finding new ways to compromise systems, defenders implementing new mitigations, attackers figuring out how to breach them, and so on. Our systems must be prepared for great varieties of different attacks, each handled with its unique antibodies, which unfortunately can only be cooked up by surviving earlier, related attacks. What’s essential is constant vigilance, and we never quite know what could go horribly wrong the next time. The game could change if […]

2018 NAACL Student Research Workshop

June 12th, 2018 / in Announcements, CCC, research horizons, Research News / by Helen Wright

Sam Bowman from New York University provided contributions to this post. The 16th Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (NAACL HLT 2018) was held in New Orleans, June 1 to June 6, 2018. The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) sponsored the 2018 NAACL Student Research Workshop (SRW) in conjunction with NAACL HLT 2018. The SRW gave student researchers in natural language processing (NLP) the opportunity to present their work and receive constructive feedback and mentorship by experienced members of the ACL community. Twenty student participants from nine countries presented original research projects and thesis proposals as both talks and posters during […]

NSF Appointment of Dr. Rance Cleaveland as Division Director for the NSF/CISE Division of Computing and Communication Foundations (CCF)

June 11th, 2018 / in Announcements, NSF, Research News / by Helen Wright

The following is a letter to the community from Erwin Gianchandani, Acting Assistant Director, of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Directorate of Computer & Information Science & Engineering (CISE).  Dear CISE Community, The NSF Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) is delighted to announce the appointment of Dr. Rance Cleaveland as the Division Director for the Division of Computing and Communication Foundations (CCF), effective July 9, 2018. Rance will be joining NSF/CISE from the University of Maryland at College Park (UMD), where he is currently Professor of Computer Science and was the Executive and Scientific Director of the Fraunhofer USA Center for Experimental and Software Engineering until 2014. Prior to joining the […]