Mozilla is currently seeking proposals for research funding to support its mission: to ensure the internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to all. These grants include topics directly relevant to current research, as well as topics that fit more broadly with their vision for improving the internet and implementing the principles of their manifesto. Mozilla funds research in a wide variety of ways, including building new technologies, improving existing technologies, and studying how people use technology. Their research domains include Emerging Technologies’ four core areas: Open Web Platform, such as Rust, Servo and Daala. We recently funded projects testing the Rust and bindgen compilers, and implementing Typed WebAssembly. Mixed Reality, […]

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has released a new program solicitation for the Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Research Initiation Initiative (CRII). The CRII program aims to award grants that support independent research to new PhDs in their first academic position in order to support the growth of future scientists and researchers in computing. The grants are intended to support untenured faculty and researchers for their first three to five years after the completion of their PhD. From the solicitation: This solicitation provides the opportunity for early-career researchers to recruit and mentor their first graduate students (or undergraduate students, in the case of faculty at undergraduate and two-year […]

The 18th International Symposium on Robotics Research (ISRR ‘17) has released a call for papers. ISRR ‘17, will take place December 11-14 in Puerto Varas, Chile. The symposium is seeking papers that offer new ideas and directions for the field of robotics. The program will comprise a combination of invited talks and open submissions organized into interactive panels, keynotes, and debates. Accepted papers will be organized into topical panels, and the panel moderators will work with the authors of accepted papers to coordinate the presentations and maximize the interactivity of the session.   The papers and panel discussions will be edited into a proceedings volume after the workshop, and will […]

The following is a blog post by Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council Member and contributor to the Robotics Roadmaps Maja Matarić.  In 2009, the CCC published a report, A Roadmap for US Robotics, From Internet to Robotics (a.k.a. the Robotics Roadmap), which explored the capacity of robotics to act as a key economic enabler, specifically in the areas of manufacturing, healthcare, and the service industry, 5, 10, and 15 years into the future. An updated version of the Robotics Roadmap was released in November 2016; it expands on the topics discussed in the 2009 roadmap and addresses the areas of public safety, earth science, and workforce development. It also emphasizes robotics […]

The following Great Innovative Idea is from David Socha from the University of Washington Bothell. Socha and his colleagues, Robin Adams (Purdue University), Kelly Franznick (Blink UX), Wolff-Michael Roth (University of Victoria), Kevin Sullivan (University of Virginia), Josh Tenenberg (University of Washington Tacoma), and Skip Walter (Factor, Inc.), published a paper called Wide-Field Ethnography: Studying Software Engineering in 2025 and Beyond, which was the first place winner at the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) sponsored Blue Sky Ideas Track Competition at the 38th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), May 14-22, 2016 in Austin, TX. The Innovative Idea Wide-field ethnography (WFE) refers to an approach of gathering and collaboratively analyzing large, multi-modal, multi-stream datasets of physical-social-economic-cyber systems (PSECs) in action. While our paper framed the WFE vision around physical-cyber-social systems (PCSSs), our […]

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation has announced it’s 2016 Sloan Research Fellows. The fellows are awarded in eight fields: chemistry, computer science, economics, mathematics, computational and evolutionary molecular biology, neuroscience, ocean sciences, and physics. The Sloan Research Fellows have been awarded annually since 1955 and given to early-career scientists and scholars whose achievements and potential identify them as rising stars. Fellows will receive $55,000 to further their research, which can be hugely impactful to a young researcher. This year’s fellows come from 52 colleges and universities in the U.S. and Canada and include a number of computer scientists with connections to the CCC, such as Shaun Kane, one of the […]