The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) and the Computing Research Association (CRA), with anticipated funding from the National Science Foundation, are pleased to announce a new call for Computing Innovation Fellows (CIFellows) for the 2010-11 academic year. The CIFellows Project is an opportunity for new Ph.D. graduates in computer science and closely related fields to obtain one- to two-year positions at universities, industrial research laboratories, and other organizations that advance the field of computing and its positive impact on society. The goals of the CIFellows Project are to retain new Ph.D.s in research and teaching during challenging economic times, and to support intellectual renewal and diversity in computing fields at U.S. organizations.

Your faithful correspondent recently attended the paired ACM-BCS Visions of Computer Science 2010 and UKCRC Grand Challenges conferences at Edinburgh University.  (Due to volcanic ash and the resulting travel snarls, this correspondent’s stay in the UK has been extended longer than expected!) The Visions conference was designed to highlight research visions for the future and consisted of invited plenaries and submitted talks. The plenaries were extremely well done.  Ross Anderson spoke about the integration of social issues and computing in the design of increasingly complex systems, using numerous examples from history and economic theory. Nicolò Cesa-Bianchi explored frontiers in machine learning, Jon Kleinberg spoke about the future of social networks, […]

What is it with disasters? They’re coming fast and furious. Here’s the 411 on robots at the China quake. The Qinghai quake is the latest of the series of tragedies. Prof. Bin Li at the Shenyang Institute of Automation and an active member of the IEEE Technical Committee on Safety Security Rescue Robots, contacted the Chinese national earthquake response service this morning. It doesn’t look like ground robots are appropriate– the structures are mostly small and constructed from brick and mud. That type of construction is problematic– the brick and mud turns to a liquidized dust, acting like water to fill all the voids and displaces air. Even if there […]

John Markoff had an extremely interesting profile of DARPA Director Regina Dugan in today’s NY Times.  Be sure to read it, here. This follows on the heels of Dr. Dugan’s impressive and heartening House Armed Services Committee testimony, blogged here, and a Computing Research News article by Lazowska and Patterson describing “New Directions at DARPA,” here. Here’s my favorite paragraph from Dr. Dugan’s HASC testimony: “Upon arrival at DARPA, we were determined to understand and repair the breach with universities. We discovered the following: Between 2001 and 2008, DARPA funding to US research university performers did decrease in real terms, by about half. But, as importantly, a noble and recent […]

Those of you who haven’t taken a look at the GENI project in the last year or two need to do so. The name is the same, but the project is totally different, and totally right-headed.  Teams of top researchers are building a diverse suite of tools and technologies that will allow a broad range of networking research experiments to be carried out.  As an example, a set of research universities and research backbone networks are in the process of rolling out Stanford’s OpenFlow switches, which will allow novel low-level protocols to be run alongside TCP/IP.  More than 200 research leaders attended the 7th GENI Engineering Conference, held March 16-17 […]