In September, the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) put out a call for visioning proposals for workshops that will create exciting visions and agendas for research at the frontiers of computing.  Proposals are due December 1, 2013. From the solicitation: Successful workshops will articulate new research visions, galvanize community interest in those visions, and mobilize support for those visions from the computing research community, government leaders, and funding agencies…Proposals are encouraged across the full spectrum of theoretical and applied work related to the creation and application of information technologies as well as their use in addressing important scientific or societal challenges…Budgets can range in size from $10,000 to as much as $200,000, depending […]

On Monday, November 25, 2013, Alessandro Acquisti from Carnegie Mellon University will present at the next Washington Area Trustworthy Computing Hour (WATCH), a series of thought-provoking talks by innovative thinkers with ideas that illuminate the challenges and provide signposts toward solutions in trustworthy computing.  The title of his talk is An Experiment in Hiring Discrimination via Online Social Networks. The series is jointly organized by the National Science Foundation (NSF) Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) and Social, Behavioral, and Economic (SBE) Directorates, and sponsored by the CISE Trustworthy Computing Program. The abstract: Anecdotal evidence and self-report surveys suggest that U.S. firms are using Web 2.0 and social networking sites to seek information about prospective hires. However, […]

President Barack Obama has announced his intent to nominate two new members to the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology Policy (PCAST).  The new appointees are J. Michael McQuade, Senior Vice President of Science and Technology at United Technologies Corporation and Susan L. Graham.  President Obama said, I am confident that these outstanding individuals will greatly serve the American people in their new roles and I look forward to working with them in the months and years to come. Graham is the current Chair of the Computing Community Consortium (CCC).  She has been a key leader with the CCC since its inception in 2006.  Graham is the Pehong Chen Distinguished Professor of […]

On November 12, 2013, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and the Networking and Information Technology R&D (NITRD) program held an event, Data to Knowledge to Action: Building New Partnerships, to showcase high-impact collaborations created as a result of the Big Data R&D Initiative and to further identify areas for expanded collaborations. John Holdren, Assistant to the President for Science and Technology, and Farnam Jahanian, Co-chair of the Subcommittee for NITRD and Assistant Director for the CISE Directorate at the National Science Foundation (NSF), opened the event with welcoming remarks and shared the progress made by Federal Agencies.  Tom Kalil, Deputy Director for Technology and Innovation at […]

A post this week in AmStatNews, the membership magazine of the American Statistical Association, is a ringing endorsement of CCC’s activities: “On the topic of Big Data and the statistical science community’s contention that the federal policymakers should be engaging statisticians more (yielding better science), one counterpart quipped that computer scientists have dominated the Big Data landscape for two reasons: their sheer numbers and the white papers generated from the Computing Research Association (CRA) Computing Community Consortium (CCC) “Indeed, it didn’t take much digging to see the influence of CCC white papers. For example, a set of slides posted to the CRA website shows the progression from the publishing of […]

On Tuesday, November 12, 2013, the first non-human rang the closing bell on the NASDAQ stock market. A robotic arm was selected to ring the bell to mark the launch of a new robotics stock index, ROBO-STOX, which is the first index to benchmark the value of robotics, automation and related technologies. Click here to watch the robotic arm in action at NASDAQ. Forbes.com announced the milestone event and additional details about the robotic arm equipped with a three-fingered gripper. They also included thoughts on the future of the robotics industry. The debate over the state of the robotics industry and its future continues – sell to academic labs or push […]