We all have seen pictures of a driverless car, loaded with quite a bit of equipment on top of the car to help in the autonomous nature of the car.  On June 24, researchers from Carnegie Mellon University brought their next generation driverless car to Washington, DC at the request of Congressman Bill Shuster of Pennsylvania.   This next generation car doesn’t look much like it’s predecessor, BOSS, who won the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge.  Rather, it looks more like any “ordinary” car, as its top-of-the-line radar, cameras, sensors and other technologies are built into the body of the vehicle. The car’s computers are tucked away under the floor.  The goal of CMU’s researchers […]

On June 26, the National Science Foundation (NSF) released a Discovery article titled Computing a Cure for HIV, written by Aaron Dubrow, Public Affairs Specialist in the Office of Legislative & Public Affairs.  The article provides an overview of the disease and how it continues to afflict millions of people worldwide. Over the past decade, scientists have been using the power of supercomputers “to better understand how the HIV virus interacts with the cells it infects, to discover or design new drugs that can attack the virus at its weak spots and even to use genetic information about the exact variants of the virus to develop patient-specific treatments.” Here are 9 […]

The following is a special contribution to this blog by by CCC Executive Council Member Mark D. Hill of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Times they are a changing. In the 20th century many researchers and companies innovated within a layer (or two) of the computing software-hardware stack. Today there is pressure and opportunity to innovate across layers, as argued in a 2012 CCC white paper on 21st Century Computer Architecture. A fantastic example of this cross-layer innovation was recently presented in the International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA) by Putman et al. “A Reconfigurable Fabric for Accelerating Large-Scale Datacenter Services”  and reported in WIRED by Robert McMillan “Microsoft Supercharges Bing […]

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has recently released a toolkit that describes NSF’s investment in fundamental research. It has infographics, fact sheets, brochures, and a video on NSF’s merit review process.  One of the infographics highlights a “Day in the Life”-how your daily activities intersect with NSF supported efforts. The following is from the NSF Press Release. “NSF’s toolkit offers a range of information about the vital work of the Foundation in a compelling way using modern communications methods,” said NSF’s Office of Legislative and Public Affairs Director Judith Gan. “We encourage the NSF community and the general public to explore the materials we’re releasing today to learn more about […]

The following is a special contribution to this blog by by CCC Executive Council Member Mark Hill and workshop organizers Luis Ceze, Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington, and James Larus, Full Professor and Head of the School of Computer and Communication Sciences at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne.  Luis Ceze and Jim Larus organized a DARPA ISAT workshop on Approximate Computing in February, 2014. The goal was to discuss how to obtain 10-100x performance and similar improvements in MIPS/watt out of future hardware by carefully trading off accuracy of a com putation for these other goals. The focus was not the underlying […]

As reported in this blog earlier in the month, the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) and Intel Labs recently announced a new partnership to support novel, transformative, multidisciplinary approaches that address the problem of securing current and emerging cyber-physical systems, the infrastructures they form, and those integrated with them. A key part of this solicitation is the use of an Ideas Lab to identify and develop novel ideas.  A unique feature of an Ideas Lab is the multidisciplinary nature of the selected participants.  The Computing Research Association (CRA), CCC’s parent organization, is working with Knowinnovation to run the Ideas Lab.  The two organizations previously worked together on a successful Ideas […]