Computing Community Consortium Blog

The goal of the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is to catalyze the computing research community to debate longer range, more audacious research challenges; to build consensus around research visions; to evolve the most promising visions toward clearly defined initiatives; and to work with the funding organizations to move challenges and visions toward funding initiatives. The purpose of this blog is to provide a more immediate, online mechanism for dissemination of visioning concepts and community discussion/debate about them.


Archive for November, 2011

 

DEBUT, Gig City™: Pushing the Envelope With Prize-Based Innovation

November 30th, 2011 / in research horizons, resources / by Erwin Gianchandani

Two relevant challenges announced recently that are placing emphasis on prize-based innovation: DEBUT Challenge (for undergraduate students): The National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB) has announced a competition — called the Design by Biomedical Undergraduate Teams (DEBUT) Challenge — for undergraduate students to foster the design and development of innovative diagnostic and therapeutic devices and technologies that address unmet health and clinical needs. According to the DEBUT website (emphasis added): NIBIB’s mission is to improve health by leading the development and accelerating the application of biomedical technologies. The goals of the challenge are 1) to provide undergraduate students valuable experiences such as working in teams, identifying unmet clinical needs, and designing, […]

DARPA May Pursue Crowdsourced Software Testing

November 29th, 2011 / in research horizons, resources / by Erwin Gianchandani

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) Information Innovation Office (I2O) announced last week its intention to issue, perhaps in December, a solicitation for Crowd Sourced Formal Verification (CSFV), with the goal of investigating “innovative approaches that automatically create games capable of transforming formal verification problems into compelling games for end users to play.” From the official notification: Currently, formal program verification is not widely practiced due to high costs and the fact that fundamental program verification problems resist automation. This is particularly an issue for the Department of Defense because formal verification, while a proven method for reducing defects in software, currently requires highly specialized talent and cannot be scaled to the […]

“Millions of Printers Open to Hack Attack”

November 29th, 2011 / in Research News / by Erwin Gianchandani

An interesting computer security research result making news this morning — and stirring some controversy — courtesy of msnbc.com: Could a hacker from half-way around the planet control your printer and give it instructions so frantic that it could eventually catch fire? Or use a hijacked printer as a copy machine for criminals, making it easy to commit identity theft or even take control of entire networks that would otherwise be secure?   It’s not only possible, but likely, say researchers at Columbia University, who claim they’ve discovered a new class of computer security flaws that could impact millions of businesses, consumers, and even government agencies [more after the jump…]. […]

“Google, Microsoft Talk Artificial Intelligence”

November 28th, 2011 / in big science, research horizons / by Erwin Gianchandani

(This post has been updated; please scroll down for the latest.) MIT’s Technology Review has an in-depth interview with Peter Norvig, Google’s Director of Research, and Eric Horvitz, a Distinguished Scientist at Microsoft Research (and a member of the CCC Council), about their optimism for the future of AI: Google and Microsoft don’t share a stage often, being increasingly fierce competitors in areas such as Web search, mobile, and cloud computing. But the rivals can agree on some things — like the importance of artificial intelligence to the future of technology.   [Norvig and Horvitz] recently spoke jointly to an audience at the Computer History Museum in Palo Alto, California, about the promise […]

A Recap of Supercomputing

November 25th, 2011 / in conference reports, research horizons / by Erwin Gianchandani

Last week in Seattle a record attendance of more than 11,000 people from throughout the world met at the Seattle Convention Center for SC11 — the largest international supercomputing conference focusing on high performance computing, networking, storage and analysis through a large industrial and research exhibition and a highly peer reviewed technical program (which was attended by almost 5,000 people this year). The conference keynote presentation was given by Jen-Hsun Huang, Co-founder, President, and CEO of NVIDIA®.

“Quantified Health”: Larry Smarr Discusses His 10-Year Quest

November 23rd, 2011 / in big science, research horizons, Research News, resources / by Erwin Gianchandani

Among the 10 world-changing ideas we featured earlier today is the “forever health monitor,” i.e., the ability to exploit today’s technology to quickly, easily, and fairly inexpensively monitor our own vital signs in real time, so that we may pinpoint the first signs of trouble as they arise. It turns out one man — Internet pioneer and founding director of California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (CalIT2) Larry Smarr — has been doing exactly that for the past 10 years. And for all his personal health instrumentation efforts, Xconomy has named Larry its Xconomist of the Week: In the 10 years since he moved to San Diego to become founding director of the [University of California] system’s [CalIT2], […]