Contributions to this post were made by Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council Member Kevin Fu, Associate Professor at the University of Michigan. Kevin also co-founded Virta Labs, a healthcare cybersecurity company. A growing number of medical devices are designed to be networked to facilitate patient care. However, as we have seen, networked medical devices and hospital records incorporate software that make them vulnerable to cybersecurity threats. Proactively addressing cybersecurity risks in hospitals reduces the patient safety impact and the overall risk to public health. On January 22, 2016, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) released a draft document to inform industry and FDA staff on recommendations for managing postmarket cybersecurity vulnerabilities for marketed medical devices. This document clarifies […]

The Computing Research Association (CRA), in consultation with the National Science Foundation (NSF), has appointed four new members to the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council: Sampath Kannan, University of Pennsylvania Maja Mataric, University of Southern California Nina Mishra, Amazon Research Holly Rushmeier, Yale University Beginning July 1, the new members will each serve three-year terms. The CCC Council is comprised of 20 members who have expertise in diverse areas of computing. They are instrumental in leading CCC’s visioning programs, which help create and enable visions for future computing research. Members serve staggered three-year terms that rotate every July. The CCC and CRA thank those Council members whose terms end on June 30 for their exceptional dedication and […]

Contributions to this post were made by Elizabeth Mynatt, CCC Vice Chair and Executive Director of the Institute for People and Technology at Georgia Tech. Dr. Mynatt was a member of the President’s Council of Advisors for Science and Technology (PCAST) working group on aging and technology and led the Computing Community Consortium’s (CCC) Aging in Place workshop. Recently, the New York Times published an article on A Push for Less Expensive Hearing Aids. The article highlighted the findings in a recent PCAST report on aging and technology. The report stated that almost two-thirds of Americans over the age of 70 have some kind of hearing loss, however many of them […]

The following is a guest post from CCC Council Member Kevin Fu, the Associate Professor of EECS at the University of Michigan and Chief Scientist of Virta Labs, Inc. Last month, the White House quietly convened a group of medical device security stakeholders and domain experts to discuss the cybersecurity challenges faced by healthcare delivery organizations and medical device manufacturers. There were actually multiple meetings. Here I summarize just one that I attended in my role as a professor leading the Archimedes Center for Medical Device Security at the University of Michigan, and in my role as a member of the Computing Research Association’s Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council. Convened by the […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is charged with catalyzing and empowering the U.S. computing research community to articulate and advance major research directions for the field. To do so, the CCC needs truly visionary leaders — people with great ideas, sound judgment, and the willingness to work hard to see things to completion. Please help the computing community by nominating such people for the Council. Established in 2006 through a cooperative agreement between the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Computing Research Association (CRA) — representing over 220 North American academic departments, industrial research labs, and professional societies with computing research interests, the CCC provides a voice for the national computing […]

The following is a Computing Research Policy Blog post by Peter Harsha, CRA Director of Government Affairs.  Experts from academia and government, including Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council Chair Greg Hager, told a congressional panel on Wednesday that the Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) program remains a crucial part of the extraordinarily productive computing research ecosystem that has made the U.S. the world leader in IT and deserves further support. The experts were witnesses at a hearing called by the House Science, Space and Technology Subcommittee on Research and Technology to review the status of the NITRD program in advance of possible reauthorization legislation from the committee. Hager, […]