At a press briefing featuring high-ranking Federal, state, and local officials on its Gaithersburg, MD, campus last month, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) announced a new partnership to establish the National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence, a “public-private collaboration for accelerating the widespread adoption of integrated cybersecurity tools and technologies.” The Center received $10 million in the FY 2012 appropriations to cover startup costs, and expects to make available opportunities for grants to address identified needed technologies. According to the Center website: The Center brings experts together from industry, government and academia under one roof to develop practical, interoperable cybersecurity approaches that address the real world needs of complex […]
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.
NIST Establishes National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence
March 7th, 2012 / in policy, resources / by Erwin GianchandaniFirst Person: “Tracking Data About Your Body”
March 6th, 2012 / in big science, research horizons, Research News / by Erwin GianchandaniLast week, we blogged about Larry Smarr’s efforts to quantify his own health. Turns out Larry is speaking out today, in his own words, as part of a front-page profile on the front page of The San Diego Tribune: “Quantified health, to me, means tracking data about your body — as simple as weighing yourself on a scale once a day to as complicated as wearing a device at night to measure every 30 seconds your sleep state… “The reason you do this — you modify your behavior. And it’s the same thing as you drive your car. You look at the speedometer, and if it’s a 60-mile-per-hour zone, you try to […]
Thank You!
March 6th, 2012 / in CCC / by Erwin GianchandaniI’d like to pause briefly today to acknowledge you — our readers. On behalf of the CCC Council, many thanks to each of you for reading the CCC Blog regularly, for contributing periodically, and for encouraging your colleagues to do so as well. We saw more traffic to the Blog last month than ever before, and so we thought we would take a quick look back today at the top 10 posts in February (following the link):
“Developing Robots That Can Teach Humans”
March 5th, 2012 / in big science, research horizons, Research News / by Erwin GianchandaniOn the heels of Saturday’s New York Times‘ story about iRobot, the National Science Foundation (NSF) is out with a feature today describing how a pair of computing researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison are programming “robot teachers” that can gaze and gesture like humans. According to the NSF piece: When it comes to communication, sometimes it’s our body language that says the most — especially when it comes to our eyes. “It turns out that gaze tells us all sorts of things about attention, about mental states, about roles in conversations,” says Bilge Mutlu, a computer scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Mutlu … a human-computer interaction specialist … and his […]
CIA CTO: “High Noon in the Information Age”
March 5th, 2012 / in big science, CCC, conference reports, research horizons, resources / by Erwin GianchandaniIra “Gus” Hunt, the CIA’s Chief Technology Officer, spoke out about the profound changes caused by information technology in recent years — much of it driven by social, mobile, and cloud applications — at the 1st Annual Emerging Technologies Symposium last month, according to Government Computer News. Noting how the Arab spring uprising “would not have been possible without these technologies,” Hunt described how the CIA is increasingly “embracing big data to dramatically speed up the tie it takes to analyze and act on the sea of data its sensors and agents” are collecting. From the GCN, which wrote about Hunt’s talk at the symposium (after the jump):
“For iRobot, the Future Is Getting Closer”
March 3rd, 2012 / in Research News / by Erwin GianchandaniA great article about iRobot Corporation — and a glimpse into the past and future in robotics — in today’s New York Times: Ever since Rosey the Robot took care of “The Jetsons” in the early 1960s, the promise of robots making everyday life easier has been a bit of a tease. Rosey, a metallic maid with a frilly apron, “kind of set expectations that robots were the future,” said Colin M. Angle, the chief executive of the iRobot Corporation. “Then, 50 years passed.” Now Mr. Angle’s company is trying to do Rosey one better — with Ava, a 5-foot-4 assistant with an iPad or an Android tablet for a brain and […]
