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 May, 2012

 

Scanning the Robots at ICRA 2012

May 30th, 2012 / in conference reports, Research News, videos / by Erwin Gianchandani

Our colleagues at IEEE’s Spectrum have posted a neat montage of the exhibit hall at last week’s 2012 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2012) — which featured more than two dozen exhibitors and attracted over 1,700 attendees. The robots at the exhibit hall included the DARPA ARM… NASA’s Robonaut 2, Willow Garage’s PR2, Intuitive Surgical’s da Vinci Surgical System, and [ReconRobotics, Inc.’s Scout], which is based in Edina, Minn., and brought a makeshift Afghanistan village to the show floor. Though we’ve seen all of these bots before, we’ve learned some new things about each of them. Check it out after the jump…

21st Century Computer Architecture

May 29th, 2012 / in big science, CCC, research horizons / by Erwin Gianchandani

In April, the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) commissioned members of the computer architecture research community to generate a short report to help guide strategic thinking in this space.  The effort aimed to complement and synthesize other recent documents, including the CCC’s Advancing Computer Architecture Research (ACAR) visioning reports and a study by the National Academies.  Today, the CCC is releasing the resultant community white paper, 21st Century Computer Architecture: Information and communication technology (ICT) is transforming our world, including healthcare, education, science, commerce, government, defense, and entertainment. It is hard to remember that 20 years ago the first step in information search involved a trip to the library, 10 years ago social networks […]

“Five Reasons ‘Big Data’ is a Big Deal”

May 29th, 2012 / in big science, policy, research horizons, Research News / by Erwin Gianchandani

Mobiledia is out this week with an interesting article about “Big Data”: Technology is improving Siri, powering driverless cars, improving cancer treatment and even being called Big Brother. But “big data” is what makes it possible, and why it’s so important.   Big data refers to the analytic algorithms applied to vast amounts of data across several different places, or simply the math and computer formulas used to sift through massive amounts of data and analyze the results to answer questions and solve problems. The edge big data has over traditional analytics is its ability to include data types that aren’t organized in tabular formats, including written documents, images and […]

Data, Computing at Center of Presidential Advisors’ Meeting

May 25th, 2012 / in big science, policy, research horizons, Research News / by Erwin Gianchandani

Data and computing were front and center at today’s meeting of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) in Washington, DC, with U.S. Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Todd Park summarizing the Administration’s rollout this week of a “digital roadmap” seeking to take advantage of existing government data repositories — and David Ferrucci, head of IBM’s Watson project, and Anthony Levandowski, product manager for Google’s self-driving car technology, delivering talks about the fundamental advances being enabled by their teams’ work (more following the link).

Turning the Body Into a Wireless Controller

May 25th, 2012 / in Research News / by Erwin Gianchandani

New Scientist published a great article last week summarizing two new gesture computing technologies developed by colleagues at Microsoft Research and the University of Washington and presented at CHI 2012 earlier this month: THE advent of multi-touch screens and novel gaming interfaces means the days of the traditional mouse and keyboard are well and truly numbered. With Humantenna and SoundWave, you won’t even have to touch a computer to control it, gesturing in its direction will be enough…   As the name suggests, Humantenna uses the human body as an antenna to pick up the electromagnetic fields — generated by power lines and electrical appliances — that fill indoor and outdoor spaces. Users wear a device […]

A Retrospective on Alan Turing’s Influence

May 24th, 2012 / in awards, resources / by Erwin Gianchandani

Ahead of the Alan Turing Centenary next month, SD Times has published an interesting retrospective describing Turing’s influence on the field: Turing’s birthday — June 23, 1912 — will be marked by worldwide celebrations. The Association for Computing Machinery is hosting its Turing Centenary Celebration on June 15 and 16 at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco…   The Turing Award, first given in 1966, is handed out each year to one or more individuals for their contributions of a technical nature to the computing community. The award also includes a US$250,000 prize.   In speaking with past winners of the Turing Award and others who have used his research as a starting point for their […]