Congress recently passed the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, a bipartisan bill which includes $550 billion in new federal spending on infrastructure over five years. President Biden is scheduled to sign the bill into law today (November 13th).   While designed as a traditional infrastructure bill, an analysis of the legislation by the Computing Research Policy Blog found several sections that are of note to the research community and the computing research community specifically: A five-year, $100 million a year SMART grant program at the Department of Transportation (DOT); several intelligent transportation and smart communities pilot programs at DOT; a new ARPA program (ARPA-Infrastructure) at DOT; Division F, a large subsection […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) recently released A National Research Agenda for Intelligent Infrastructure: 2021 Update, which surveys a comprehensive set of earlier intelligent infrastructure whitepapers from 2017 and a more recent set of companion Quadrennial whitepapers on closely related topics. The update then highlights four themes of rising national prominence where intelligent infrastructure can play an enabling role.  Examples of how intelligent infrastructure can have an impact include: COVID-19 pandemic and natural disasters: Intelligent infrastructure such as GIS dashboards, computational simulations, cloud computing, and broadband helped virus monitoring, policy-intervention comparisons, tele-work, tele-education, and  tele-health. New opportunities include National Pandemic Informatics Infrastructure to monitor virus mutations, as well as emergency […]

A new episode of the Catalyzing Computing podcast is out now! In this episode Khari Douglas interviews Dr. Beth Mynatt, the Executive Director of Georgia Tech’s Institute for People and Technology (IPaT), a College of Computing Distinguished Professor, and the Director of the Everyday Computing Lab. Dr. Mynatt discusses her research into human computer interaction and her work at IPaT and the GVU center. Stream in the embedded player below or find the podcast on iTunes | Spotify | Stitcher | Google Play | Youtube. If you listen to the podcast, please take a moment to complete this listener survey – this survey will help us learn more about you and better tailor the show to the interests of our listeners. https://soundcloud.com/compcomcon/interview-with-beth-mynatt-part-1  

MIT Technology Review publishes an annual list of 35 innovators under the age of 35, and they recently released their list of innovators for 2018. The list features over 20 innovators who are solving problems related to or using computer science. Some highlights from the list include: Menno Veldhorst, Delft University – Veldhorst demonstrated a way to print quantum circuits on silicon, a task long considered impossible. This system of printing is now being used by Intel to create their new “spin qubit” chip and has greatly increased their capacity to produce quantum chips. Elizabeth Nyeko, Modularity Grid – The CEO of Modularity Grid, Nyeko has designed an intelligent, cloud-based system to […]

US Ignite, a nonprofit whose mission is to push the creation of next-generation applications and services that utilize networking technologies to build smart communities, recently released a video showcase of select US Ignite Smart Gigabit Community application teams from their 2017 US Ignite Application Summit. The videos include: Compute for Cancer: Compute for Cancer is where the Internet of things meets distributed computing. The world is full of unused or underutilized computing power. Using the Berkeley Open Infrastructure Network Computing, these application developers are working to collect idle computing power from any device such as a phone, computer or data center and donate it to cancer research supercomputers. 
Watch the video or learn more. […]

On October 23-24, 2017, the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) will hold the Computing Research: Addressing National Priorities and Societal Needs Symposium in order to address the current and future contribution of computing and its role in addressing societal needs. The two days are organized around four main themes: Intelligent Infrastructure for our Cities and Communities: Intelligent infrastructure is already transforming our nation’s cities and communities, but the technological revolution is just now beginning. This session will highlight some of the major advances taking place now, while at the same time emphasizing the substantial body of research, much of it crossing disciplinary boundaries, that still needs to be done. Security and Privacy for Democracy:Computing research […]