Currently, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is hosting a three-day forum:  Wait, What? A Future Technology Forum, focusing on new technologies and how they can change the future, in particular with respect to national security. Three early-career engineers and scientists, chosen from a pool of 54 candidates, were selected to share their ideas to the Forum Participants.  They are: Alexander Bataller, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California Los Angeles …who studies dense microplasmas, a recently discovered form of matter… Anupama Lakshmanan, a graduate student in biology and biological engineering at the California Institute of Technology…focuses on adapting immune cells to provide non-invasive diagnosis, continuous monitoring and real-time treatment of […]

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Defense Sciences Office (DSO) is sponsoring a two-day Proposers Day event to provide information to potential proposers on the objectives of the anticipated Defense Sciences Office (DSO) Office-wide Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) releasing sometime in June 2015. The goals of this event are to: (1) familiarize participants with DSO’s mission; (2) promote understanding of the anticipated Office-wide BAA; and (3) facilitate discussions with potential performers and program managers. Some areas of interest among the current program managers include: Computationally accelerated discovery Alternative computational substrates Geometry, graphics, modeling and design Novel sensor systems, imaging and optics technologies and algorithms This free event will be held on […]

60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl interviewed Dan Kaufman, Director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)’s Information Innovation Office (I2O), for the following clip called Nobody’s safe on the Internet which aired on February 8th. The 13 minute clip highlights how hacking is now a matter of national security, something many in the computer science community have been saying for a long time. As our society continues to become more technologically advanced the situation will only become more serious. Internet connectivity will become embedded in everything from our baby monitors to refrigerators, through Internet of Things technologies, and our privacy and security to be compromised. This is an issue that is beginning […]

On November 6, 2014, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Biological Technologies Office (BTO) announced a new program with a simplified process for engaging with DARPA that will make it easier for businesses to attract up to $700k in seedling funding to pursue capabilities at the intersection of biology and technology. From Dr. Alicia Jackson, deputy director of DARPA’s BTO: DARPA’s Biological Technologies Office looks at biology as a technology, with a focus on harnessing living systems or integrating those systems with nonliving systems.  If you look at where we’re already invested, it’s in areas such as human-machine interfaces, synthetic biology, combatting infectious disease and optimizing human health. The ideas we’re seeking would continue that […]

The following is a special contribution to this blog by by CCC Executive Council Member Mark Hill and workshop organizers Luis Ceze, Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington, and James Larus, Full Professor and Head of the School of Computer and Communication Sciences at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne.  Luis Ceze and Jim Larus organized a DARPA ISAT workshop on Approximate Computing in February, 2014. The goal was to discuss how to obtain 10-100x performance and similar improvements in MIPS/watt out of future hardware by carefully trading off accuracy of a com putation for these other goals. The focus was not the underlying […]

There are many reasons for research funding agencies (DARPA, NSF, etc.) to invest in the education of students. Producing the next generation of innovators is the most obvious one. In addition, though, there are an impressive number of instances in our field in which undergraduate and graduate students have made truly game-changing contributions in the course of their studies. The inspiring list in the attached PDF was compiled by the following individuals and their colleagues: Bill Bonvillian (MIT), Susan Graham (Berkeley), Anita Jones (University of Virginia), Ed Lazowska (University of Washington), Pat Lincoln (SRI), Fred Schneider (Cornell), and Victor Zue (MIT). We solicit your suggestions for additional student contributions of […]