An end-of-year, end-of-decade article in the Xconomy tech blog by CCC’s Ed Lazowska.  Read the complete post here. Forty years ago, in 1969, Neil Armstrong left footprints on the surface of the moon.  It was an extraordinary accomplishment. Also in 1969, with much less fanfare and at much less expense, Len Kleinrock’s programmer Charley Kline sent the first message over ARPANET.  (The message was “lo” – the first two letters of “login.”  Then the system crashed.) With forty years of hindsight, which of these events has had the greater impact?  Unless you’re really big into Tang and Velcro, the answer is clear.  From four computers in 1969, the Internet has […]

The Cross-layer Reliability Visioning Study Group met October 29-30 at the IBM Austin Research Center in Austin, Texas. This was the third of three scheduled meetings focused on the growing challenges imposed by changes in device technology, system sizes, and application requirements.  A major goal of the Cross-layer Reliability Visioning process is to reach some consensus on how to achieve reliable computing using unpredictable components across different layers that dictate system reliability (i.e., device technology, design, architecture, software).  While the first two meetings focused on defining the multi-dimensional cross-layer reliability design space and presented cross-layer challenges as viewed from a range of application domains (e.g., consumer electronics, space/avionics, etc.), the […]

The CCC co-sponsored and co-organized the Discovery and Innovation in Health IT Workshop in San Francisco on October 29 and 30, 2009 (http://cra.org/ccc/visioning/visioning-activities/2012-activities/health-it/ ). The Discovery and Innovation in Health IT Workshop was an attempt to make further inroads on productive collaboration between healthcare and computing, exploring and defining fundamental computing research challenges and opportunities in healthcare IT in both the near- and long-term and identifying a range of “model” proof-of-concept, integrative systems that might serve as motivating and unifying forces to drive fundamental research in healthcare IT. Highlights of the workshop included plenary presentations by William Stead of Vanderbilt and Richard Bucholz of St. Louis University School of Medicine. […]