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 April, 2012

 

NSF, NIH to Hold Webinar on Big Data Solicitation

April 30th, 2012 / in big science, research horizons, resources / by Erwin Gianchandani

Late last month, the Administration unveiled a $200 million Big Data R&D Initiative, committing new funding to improve “our ability to extract knowledge and insights from large and complex collections of digital data.” The initiative includes a joint solicitation by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and National Institutes of Health (NIH), providing up to $25 million for Core Techniques and Technologies for Advancing Big Data Science and Engineering (BIGDATA). Now NSF and NIH have announced a webinar “to describe the goals and focus of the BIGDATA solicitation, help investigators understand its scope, and answer any questions potential Principal Investigators (PIs) may have.” The webinar will take place next week — on Tuesday, May 8th, from 11am to […]

The Inaugural Collective Intelligence Conference

April 27th, 2012 / in big science, conference reports, research horizons / by Erwin Gianchandani

Researchers from multiple disciplines spanning computer science, mathematics, the social, behavioral, and economic sciences, and biology gathered at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology last week for the first-ever Collective Intelligence conference. Organized by Tom Malone (MIT) and Luis von Ahn (Carnegie Mellon University), the conference sought papers about behavior that is both collective (spanning groups of individual actors, including people, computational agents, and organizations) and intelligent (the collective behavior of the group exhibits characteristics such as perception, learning, judgment, or problem solving). Over 100 papers were submitted for consideration, and 18 were selected for presentation (following the link):

21st Century Cities — and Microsoft’s Energy-Smart Buildings

April 26th, 2012 / in big science, research horizons, workshop reports / by Erwin Gianchandani

The following is a special contribution to this blog from Elizabeth L. Grossman, a member of Microsoft Corporation’s Technology Policy Group. Yesterday, Microsoft’s Innovation & Policy Center, in Washington, DC, hosted a panel discussion on “21st Century Cities” as part of the @Microsoft Conversations series. The panel explored the technology and policy opportunities and challenges around making our cities smarter and more energy efficient, such as how information technology (IT) can link people, transportation, and buildings. This blog post provides information about some of the Microsoft sustainability activities in this area — particularly how we use our campus and facilities as a living lab — and future directions in computing […]

ACM Honors Innovators for Research, Education Advances

April 26th, 2012 / in awards / by Erwin Gianchandani

Congratulations to Luis von Ahn, Hanan Samet, Hal Abelson, and Stephanie Forrest, who today were named recipients of four prestigious awards issued by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). The awards, which honor the recipients for the significant contributions that they have made to enable computer science to solve real-world challenges, “reflect achievements in human-computer interaction, computer science education, geographical information science, and computer simulation for biological research.” According to ACM’s press release:

NSF’s Arctic SEES Program

April 26th, 2012 / in research horizons, resources / by Erwin Gianchandani

The National Science Foundation (NSF), in partnership with the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), and a consortium of French agencies, has announced a new program under its Science, Engineering, and Education for Sustainability (SEES) initiative focused on the Arctic. This program — dubbed Arctic SEES, or simply ArcSEES — seeks “fundamental research that improves our ability to evaluate the sustainability of the Arctic human-environmental system as well as integrated efforts which will provide community-relevant sustainability pathways and engineering solutions.” As with several SEES solicitations issued in FY 2012, the FY 2013 ArcSEES solicitation offers opportunities for computing researchers. In particular, from the […]

“Standards for Postdoc Training”

April 25th, 2012 / in pipeline, policy, resources / by Erwin Gianchandani

An interesting editorial (subscription required) in this week’s Science magazine, authored by Alan I. Leshner, the Chief Executive Officer of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and Executive Publisher of Science: Postdoctoral (Postdoc) training has become virtually institutionalized in many parts of the world as a discrete stage in the career progression in most science and engineering fields. However, there is far too much variability in what such training involves, across institutions and among the laboratories within them. Given its importance and pervasiveness — there are over 50,000 postdocs in the United States alone — we need to establish and enforce standards, norms, and expectations for mentors, mentees, and their institutions that are […]