Earlier this afternoon, the National Science Foundation (NSF) held an informational webinar about its new multi-disciplinary Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace (SaTC) program. Replacing NSF’s Trustworthy Computing (TwC) program this year, SaTC expands cybersecurity research support within the Foundation beyond the Computer & Information Science & Engineering (CISE) Directorate for the first time, to include the directorates for Social, Behavioral, & Economic Sciences (SBE) and Mathematical and Physical Sciences (MPS) as well as the Office of Cyberinfrastructure (OCI). In the webinar, NSF officials highlighted the goals and driving principles underlying the SaTC solicitation and offered deep dives into each of three “perspectives.” They also noted that any proposer should clearly delineate his or her problem statement and specify the relevance of his or her proposed work to the […]

An interesting piece about the future of human computing in the print edition of The Economist tomorrow — and it features the thinking of CCC Council member Eric Horvitz along with several others: …Over the past few years, human computing has been reborn. The new generation of human computers carry out different tasks, but they mirror their predecessors in many other ways. They are being drafted in to perform tasks that computers cannot. They are employed in large numbers and are organised into streamlined workflows. And, as was the case in the age before electronic computers, their output is combined to generate results that could not easily be produced in any other way.