Last week, the UC Berkeley’s School of Information held a forum — called the DataEDGE Conference — seeking to explore the challenges and opportunities associated with the transition to a data-intensive economy. One of the speakers was danah boyd, Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research and an Assistant Professor at New York University, who discussed the implications of Big Data on privacy — and the role for researchers and technologists moving forward. The New York Times‘ Bits Blog has coverage of boyd’s talk: “Privacy is a source of tremendous tension and anxiety in Big Data,” says Danah Boyd, a senior researcher at Microsoft Research. Speaking last week at a conference on Big Data at the University of […]
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.
“Rethinking Privacy in an Era of Big Data”
June 5th, 2012 / in big science, conference reports, policy, research horizons, Research News / by Erwin GianchandaniNIST Holding BIG DATA Workshop Next Week
June 4th, 2012 / in big science, policy, research horizons, resources / by Erwin GianchandaniThe National Institute of Standards and Technology’s (NIST) Information Technology Laboratory (ITL) has announced plans to hold a workshop on its Gaithersburg, MD, campus next week — Wednesday and Thursday, June 13 and 14 — exploring “key national priority topics” in support of the Federal government’s recently-announced Big Data R&D Initiative. The BIG DATA Workshop is free and open to all, but attendees must pre-register online by this Wednesday, June 6th in order to clear security. According to NIST/ITL (following the link):
“The Future of History’s Most Disruptive Technology”
June 2nd, 2012 / in big science, computer history, research horizons, resources, videos / by Erwin GianchandaniBeginning at 1pm EDT this afternoon, the World Science Festival — an annual celebration and exploration of science, culture, and art that’s taking place all across New York City this week — will stream live from New York University’s Skirball Center for the Performing Arts a 90-minute session titled “Internet Everywhere: The Future of History’s Most Disruptive Technology”: Disruptive technologies uproot culture, can precipitate wars and even topple empires. By this measure, human history has seen nothing like the Internet. Pioneers of the digital revolution examine the Internet’s brief but explosive history and reveal nascent projects that will shortly reinvent how we interact with technology — and each other. From social upheaval […]
Early Details About DARPA’s Five-Year, $110 Million “Plan X”
June 1st, 2012 / in big science, research horizons, Research News, resources / by Erwin GianchandaniA number of news outlets have begun covering Plan X, a new five-year, $110 million cyberwarfare research program that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) expects to launch this summer. According to The Washington Post, which broke the news earlier this week: The Pentagon is turning to the private sector, universities and even computer-game companies as part of an ambitious effort to develop technologies to improve its cyberwarfare capabilities, launch effective attacks and withstand the likely retaliation. The previously unreported effort, which its authors have dubbed Plan X, marks a new phase in the nation’s fledgling military operations in cyberspace, which have focused more on protecting the Defense Department’s computer systems than on […]
Scanning the Robots at ICRA 2012
May 30th, 2012 / in conference reports, Research News, videos / by Erwin GianchandaniOur colleagues at IEEE’s Spectrum have posted a neat montage of the exhibit hall at last week’s 2012 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2012) — which featured more than two dozen exhibitors and attracted over 1,700 attendees. The robots at the exhibit hall included the DARPA ARM… NASA’s Robonaut 2, Willow Garage’s PR2, Intuitive Surgical’s da Vinci Surgical System, and [ReconRobotics, Inc.’s Scout], which is based in Edina, Minn., and brought a makeshift Afghanistan village to the show floor. Though we’ve seen all of these bots before, we’ve learned some new things about each of them. Check it out after the jump…
21st Century Computer Architecture
May 29th, 2012 / in big science, CCC, research horizons / by Erwin GianchandaniIn April, the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) commissioned members of the computer architecture research community to generate a short report to help guide strategic thinking in this space. The effort aimed to complement and synthesize other recent documents, including the CCC’s Advancing Computer Architecture Research (ACAR) visioning reports and a study by the National Academies. Today, the CCC is releasing the resultant community white paper, 21st Century Computer Architecture: Information and communication technology (ICT) is transforming our world, including healthcare, education, science, commerce, government, defense, and entertainment. It is hard to remember that 20 years ago the first step in information search involved a trip to the library, 10 years ago social networks […]
