THE COMPUTING COMMUNITY CONSORTIUM SEEKS NOMINATIONS FOR COUNCIL MEMBERS The CCC’s Nominating Committee invites nominations (including self-nominations) for members to serve on the CCC Council for the next three years. Please send nominations, together with the information below, to ccc-nominations@cra.org by 11:59pm EDT on Monday, March 11, 2013. The subcommittee’s recommendations will serve as input to the Computing Research Association (CRA) and National Science Foundation (NSF), who will make the final selection. What is the CCC and why are these nominations important? The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is charged with catalyzing and empowering the U.S. computing research community to answer critical questions such as, “What questions shape our intellectual future?” […]

Martha Pollack, University of Michigan Professor of EECS and past Dean of their School of Information, has been selected as Michigan’s next Provost. This is another sign of the increasing influence of computer scientists in leadership positions at forward-looking universities:  Stanford (John Hennessy, President), Harvey Mudd (Maria Klawe, President), MIT (Eric Grimson, Chancellor), now Michigan. Congratulations Martha! Read more here.

Big Data could revolutionize healthcare by replacing up to 80% of what doctors do while still maintaining over 91% accuracy. Please take a look at the infographic below to learn more.  

Four computer scientists have received the film industry’s highest honor, an Academy Award, for their technical achievement in special effects. The researchers – Theodore Kim (UCSB), Nils Thuerey (Scanline VFX), Markus Gross (ETH Zurich), and Doug James (Cornell) –  developed a software algorithm called Wavelet Turbulence, and they expect it to have applications beyond entertainment in other disciplines such as medicine and aerospace. The innovative software algorithm generates realistic swirling smoke and fiery explosions that are more detailed, easier to control and faster to create than previous technology, and it has been used in more than two dozen recent movies in the past few years.   “As a scientist and a […]

In recent years, interest has been growing in the emerging interdisciplinary area of Human Computation, a field that explores principles and applications around giving computing systems programmatic access to human intellect to perform some aspect of computation, whether involving individuals or groups of people (“the crowd”). The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) Conference on Human Computation and Crowdsourcing (HCOMP-2013) will bring several fields together in the first major academic conference on this topic. The conference will take place November 7-9, 2013 in Palm Springs, California. The paper submission deadline is May 1, and there will also be workshops, tutorials, posters, and demonstrations. Eric Horvitz, from Microsoft Research, past president of AAAI, and a current Computing Community […]

On January 16, President Obama announced his intention to appoint Vint Cerf – Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist at Google – to the National Science Board. The 25-member National Science Board is the governance body for the National Science Foundation, and additionally serves as an independent body of advisors to both the President and the Congress on policy matters related to science and engineering and education in science and engineering. Cerf – widely regarding along with his colleague Bob Kahn as “the father of the Internet” – received the National Medal of Technology in 1997, the ACM A.M. Turing Award in 2004, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in […]