Nov

26

Solicitation of Nominations for the Council of the Computing Community Consortium

Filed Under Uncategorized | Comments

Deadline:  December 11, 2009

What questions shape our intellectual future? What attracts the best and brightest minds of a new generation? What are the next big computing ideas – the ones that will define the future of computing, galvanize the very best students, and catalyze research investment and public support?

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is charged with mobilizing the computing research community to answer these questions by identifying major research opportunities for the field, and by creating venues for community participation in this process. The CCC supports these efforts through advocacy with federal agencies, through visioning activities such as workshops, through arranging plenary talks on key topics at major venues, and through other community building activities.

The CCC is funded by the National Science Foundation under a cooperative agreement with the Computing Research Association. The work of the CCC is carried out by an active and engaged Council, currently chaired by Ed Lazowska with Susan Graham as vice-chair, which reports to the CRA board. The members of the Council are appointed by CRA in consultation with NSF, with staggered 3 year terms. In the aggregate, the Council must reflect the full breadth of the computing research community – research area, institutional character, etc. Details on the role of CCC, as well as the current composition of the Council, may be found at http://www.cra.org/ccc/.

We invite nominations (including self-nominations) for members to serve on the CCC Council for the next three years. Please send suggestions, together with the information below, to Eric Grimson (mailto:welg@csail.mit.edu) by December 11th. Also serving on the nomination committee are Kathleen Fisher, Susan Graham and Jennifer Widom. This committee’s recommendations will serve as input to CRA and NSF, who are responsible for making the final selection.

1.     Name, affiliation, and email address of the nominee.

2.     Research interests.

3.     Previous significant service to the research community and other relevant experience, with years it occurred (no more than *five* items).

4.     A brief biography or curriculum vitae of the nominee.

5.     A statement from the nominee of less than 1 page, supporting his or her nomination by describing his or her ideas for, and commitment to, advancing the work of the CCC in engaging broader communities, finding wider funding sources, and encouraging new research directions. What the CCC Council needs is not famous people with lots of awards, but people with ideas, judgment, and the willingness to work.

Nov

21

National Computer Science Education Week

Filed Under pipeline, policy | Comments

Congress has resolved that the week of December 7 will be designated as “National Computer Science Education Week.”  Organizations such as the ACM, CRA, and NCWIT, along with industrial partners, are planning to use this week to promote awareness of computer science education.

The NSF has invested in a number of programs that seek to  re-envision K-12 and undergraduate computer science education.  A recent article by Jeannette Wing, Assistant Director of NSF for CISE, summarizes the rationale, the challenges, and some of the specific initiatives.

We’re eager to hear your ideas on ways that computer science education could be improved, both at the K-12  and college level.  We’re also  interested in hearing your thoughts on how the importance of computer science might be more effectively communicated to a broad audience.

Nov

6

Metagenomics and the Computing Challenges of Microbial Communities

Filed Under big science, research horizons | Comments

Why should you care about microbial communities?
Except for viruses, they are the most abundant life on Earth and have an
overwhelming effect on our environment and our lives. Consider that about
half the carbon dioxide on Earth is processed through microbes that live in
the oceans. Then consider that the most modern climate models of ocean life
include just five organisms. This is despite recent findings that point to
thousands of oceanic species, which do many different things and presumably
influence our climate.

Metagenomics is a relatively new field that seeks to understand the
structure and function of the shockingly large number of microorganisms on
our planet.  New technologies permit us to now sequence samples taken from
their environment rather than only those that are cultivated in the lab. For
example, Craig Ventner’s Global Ocean Sampling Expedition has collected water throughout the world’s oceans, captured organisms, and sequenced their DNA. In the initial pilot study alone, nearly 150 new bacteria were discovered through this process.

The science and computing challenges are huge. A single gram of soil
contains approximately one trillion base pairs of DNA. Scientists at the National Institutes of Health recently compared over 100,000 bacterial gene sequences on the human skin and discovered a far larger number of different bacteria living on human skin than had been previously known (Science, May 28, 2009). Sequencing and making sense of these data introduces new computational problems, not merely slight extensions of existing ones.

The potential impacts of understanding these data are huge as well. In the
case of soil, microbial communities have an impact on carbon sequestration
and understanding them may help us with cleaning toxic waste. In our bodies,
microbial cells are estimated to outnumber our human cells by a factor of
ten to one and are important in protecting our skin, digestion, and much
more. Understanding these large microbial communities is therefore likely to
have a positive impact on human health. The NIH has launched the Human
Microbiome Project to support work in this field.

Complete DNA sequences of thousands of organisms are piling up in databases
because of the efficiency of DNA sequencing technologies. Most of this
remains unanalyzed for several reasons. We don’t yet know the right
biological questions to ask. We don’t have all the clever programs that
would actually ask these questions of the computer. And there is now so much
data that many questions totally overwhelm even existing high performance
computers.

Among the computational challenges in this field are the design of new
algorithms and cloud computing technologies. In the National Academies of
Science publication “The New Science of Metagenomics: Revealing the Secrets
of our Microbial Planet”, the authors conclude “What then, will metagenomics
have become, in 20 years? We believe that it too will be a concept-driven
computational science… We can expect, in 20 years, enormous advances on
three fronts – technical, computational, and biological – as well as a host
of specific applications.”

We encourage our community to explore and engage in this and other emerging
fields at the crossroads of biology and computation. This is one of the
exciting areas for 21st century computing.

Contributed by Bill Feiereisen with assistance from Ran Libeskind-Hadas