To help mark the 60th anniversary of its Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP), the National Science Foundation (NSF) has announced a new video contest — “Creating the Future” — that challenges Fellows to create short videos, not to exceed 90 seconds each, communicating how their NSF-funded research will help shape the future for themselves, for their field, or for the world. Submissions are due by Sept. 14, 2012, and winners — to be selected by a panel of judges as well as the broader public for a “People’s Choice” award category — will be announced in mid-November. First place carries a $2,000 cash prize. According to the contest website (following the link):

At the Computing Research Association’s (CRA) biennial Snowbird Conference today, the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board (CSTB) will roll out a new report — “Continuing Innovation in Information Technology” — updating the widely known “tire tracks” diagram that links government investments in academic and industry research to the creation of new information technology industries that drive our economy. According to the report (click on the link below to read more and see the new “tire tracks” figure!):

(This post has been updated; please scroll down for the latest.) This afternoon, the White House named 96 researchers — including a 2009 Computing Innovation Fellow (CIFellow) — as recipients of the 2012 Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), “the highest honor bestowed by the United States Government on science and engineering professionals in the early stages of their independent research careers.” Established in 1996 and coordinated by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), the awards honor individuals “for their pursuit of innovative research at the frontiers of science and technology and their commitment to community service as demonstrated through scientific leadership, public education, or community outreach.” Among this […]

(This post has been updated; please scroll down for the latest.) For those of you who have been regulars of the CCC Blog since the early days (back in late 2008), thanks for continuing to click on to us. For the rest of you — we’ve seen a surge in traffic in the last year, so many of you are new subscribers/readers — we thought we would take a moment to provide some background about the Computing Community Consortium (CCC). In particular, at the Computing Research Association’s (CRA) biennial Snowbird Conference this week, the CCC is rolling out a new brochure that summarizes its brief history, key goals, and primary […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) has issued a call for participation for an upcoming visioning workshop on spatial computing. Led by Shashi Shekhar (University of Minnesota), the workshop — to be held in Washington, DC, on Sept. 10-11, 2012 — seeks to develop and promote a unified agenda for spatial computing R&D across U.S. agencies, universities, and corporations. From the call for participation (following the link):

The following is a special contribution to this blog by Carlos Guestrin, who will be joining the faculty of the University of Washington computer science and engineering department this fall. Carlos led the organization of the First GraphLab Workshop on Large-scale Machine Learning in San Francisco, CA. The scale and complexity of data on the web continues to grow at a tremendous rate. A recent New York Times article compared Big Data to an economic asset for companies, like currency and gold. But, in order to extract value from 6 billion Flickr images, 900 million Facebook users, 24 million Wikipedia articles, or the 72 hours of video uploaded to YouTube per minute, we need […]