Susan Graham provided a great overview in a post a few days ago of the Computing Community Consortium’s March 25th day-long Library of Congress symposium, “Computing Research that Changed the World:  Reflections and Perspectives.”  I thought I’d provide a few additional details — as well as a reminder that all materials (slides, videos, a summary booklet, etc.) will be available on the CCC website in the very near future. Inspiration for the program came from a large number of responses from the computing research community to two November CCC blog posts — this was your symposium! Each of the talks was superb.  Honestly, in 35 years in the field, I’ve […]

A contribution from Susan Graham, the Pehong Chen Professor of Computer Science at the University of California at Berkeley, and co-chair of the CCC Council: I’ve just returned from the CCC-organized Symposium on “Computing Research that Changed the World.” (http://www.cra.org/ccc/locsymposium.php) It was a marvelous experience. There were 12 wonderful 15-minute talks that highlighted major achievements in computing in the last 10-20 years, the research advances that enabled them, and the opportunities to move forward in the various fields in the years ahead. In the morning, Al Spector outlined the technologies that enable us to google, Eric Brewer explained the emergence of the cloud, and Luis von Ahn showed us how […]

Rescue Robots at the Cologne Germany Building Collapse I finished The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death by Charlie Huston just before the City Archives collapsed in Cologne, Germany, on March 3. I soon found myself at my 11th disaster, but unlike Webb, the protagonist who must come to grips with the events that led him to a janitorial job cleaning up trauma sites, I was clear on why I was there standing in the rain. I was there in the hope that we could make a difference with technology — that we could enable the fire rescue teams to save a life, prevent a responder’s death, or […]

Ed Lazowska and Peter Lee on November 4 proposed a brainstorming exercise to identify about a dozen game-changing advances in computing research over the past 20 years. A large number of people responded, as summarized in a November 30 post. The CCC has organized a really important symposium on March 25 that has short talks on 12 such advances. Check out http://www.cra.org/ccc/locsymposium.php for details. I think that this symposium is really important because with a new administration in Washington, we have people who appreciate the importance of fundamental research. If we increase the size of the funding pie, all of us will benefit. The best way to increase the size […]