The June issue of the Communications of the ACM (CACM) features the Viewpoint article “A Vision to Compute Like Nature: Thermodynamically.” Based on the Computing Community Consortium’s (CCC) Thermodynamic Computing workshop, this article advocates for a novel, physically grounded, computational paradigm centered on thermodynamics that the authors call “Thermodynamic Computing” (TC). This Viewpoint was written by workshop co-organizers, Todd Hylton (UC San Diego), Tom Conte (Georgia Tech), and Mark D. Hill (Microsoft & U. Wisconsin). In the article, they lay out the premise of TC: “…living systems evolve energy-efficient, universal, self-healing, and complex computational capabilities that dramatically transcend our current technologies. Animals, plants, bacteria, and proteins solve problems by spontaneously […]

The Communications of the ACM (CACM), the print and online publication for the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM), has recently released a Viewpoints article titled, “Ask Not What Your Postdoc Can Do for You” from the leads of the Computing Community Consortium’s (CCC) Postdoc Best Practices program (Postdocs BP). The program, with the backing of the National Science Foundation (NSF), will conclude this summer.  The Postdocs BP program was a follow-on to the Computing Innovation Fellows project, which ran from 2009 – 2014.  Three different universities/consortia received awards in 2014 to develop, implement and institutionalize the implementation of best practices for supporting postdocs in computing. The three groups are: The University […]