Calling her colleagues the “best-in-class scientists and engineers [who] come to serve their country,” DARPA Director Regina Dugan described in a recent interview at the D9 Conference how her agency is driving technological innovations that better enable our nation’s military to “create and prevent strategic surprise.” Among the topics she discussed was cybersecurity: One of the things we have been investigating is how you design hardware and software within a computer so that you can determine yourself, or the computer itself can evolve, based on its own experience with threat. It’s modeled after the human immune system. An awful lot of the reason that people haven’t investigated these types 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.
“The Nation’s Elite Army of Futuristic Techno-Geeks”
June 8th, 2011 / in policy, research horizons / by Erwin GianchandaniWatson’s Lead Developer: “Deep analysis, speed, and results”
June 7th, 2011 / in big science, conference reports, research horizons / by Erwin GianchandaniDavid Ferrucci’s official title is “IBM Fellow and Leader of the Semantic Analysis and Integration Department at IBM’s T.J. Watson Research Center.” But to the world, he’s the genius behind Watson, the question-answering supercomputer system that bested two humans in a nationally televised broadcast of the popular game show Jeopardy! earlier this year. And not just any two humans, but the two very best players in the show’s 27-year history. On Monday, Ferrucci delivered a fantastic keynote at the ACM’s 2011 Federated Computing Research Conference in San Jose, CA. Ferrucci walked the audience — nearly 2,000 computer scientists from around the country — through the creation of Watson, from its initial conception […]
In Testimony, CISE AD Describes Research Contributions
June 6th, 2011 / in pipeline, policy, research horizons / by Erwin GianchandaniFarnam Jahanian, the Assistant Director for CISE, testified at a U.S. House of Representatives hearing on May 25th. The hearing, convened jointly by the Subcommittee on Technology and Innovation and the Subcommittee on Research and Science Education, examined Federal agency efforts to improve our nation’s cybersecurity and prepare the future cybersecurity talent needed for preserving national security. As part of his testimony, Jahanian listed a series of contributions the computing research community has made with support from NSF and other Federal funding agencies: Cryptographic schemes and cryptographic-based authentication, enabling today’s Internet commerce, supporting secure digital signatures and online credit card transactions Program analyses and verification techniques, enabling the early detection of […]
Taking a Square Root With DNA
June 5th, 2011 / in Research News / by Erwin GianchandaniSome research news last Friday that’s been the subject of much chatter in the popular press: Caltech researchers Lulu Qian and Eric Winfree — who holds a joint appointment in computer science and bioengineering — were able to get 74 molecules of DNA to take the square root of a number and round the result to the nearest integer. It isn’t a big number (the largest is 15). It isn’t particularly fast (the calculation takes about 10 hours). And it isn’t the first biochemical circuit ever to be assembled (Winfree and his colleagues first built something like this back in 2006). But it’s noteworthy because it is the first circuit capable […]
“My Experiences as a CIFellow”
June 2nd, 2011 / in CIFellows / by Erwin GianchandaniThe following is a special contribution to this blog by Cindy L. Bethel, a 2009 Computing Innovation Fellow (CIFellow) working with Brian Scassellati in the Social Robotics Laboratory at Yale University. Cindy received her Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of South Florida in 2009 under the direction of co-advisors Robin Murphy and Larry Hall. Her research focuses on the areas of human-robot interaction and social robotics. Click here for more information about Cindy, or here for more details about the CIFellows Project. Entering the workforce following the support and protection of graduate school can be challenging. These challenges were compounded by a difficult economy with limited […]
NSF Seeking Proposals With “Biological and Computing Shared Principles”
June 1st, 2011 / in research horizons, resources / by Erwin GianchandaniThe NSF’s CISE and Biological Sciences (BIO) directorates have joined forces to seek interdisciplinary proposals that further the frontiers of both fields. In a recent Dear Colleague Letter (DCL) for Biological and Computing Shared Principles: The [BIO and CISE directorates] invite proposals that advance research focused on principles shared between the two disciplines. Proposals that include sustained, synergistic collaborations, leading to new advances in both disciplines, will be the most competitive. Proposals should address shared principles that contribute to conceptual advances in both biology and computing. We recognize that new ideas are emerging rapidly at the crossroads of the biological sciences and computing, and we encourage investigators to pursue novel focus […]
