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 the ‘conference reports’ category

 

“Rethinking Privacy in an Era of Big Data”

June 5th, 2012 / in big science, conference reports, policy, research horizons, Research News / by Erwin Gianchandani

Last week, the UC Berkeley’s School of Information held a forum — called the DataEDGE Conference — seeking to explore the challenges and opportunities associated with the transition to a data-intensive economy. One of the speakers was danah boyd, Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research and an Assistant Professor at New York University, who discussed the implications of Big Data on privacy — and the role for researchers and technologists moving forward. The New York Times‘ Bits Blog has coverage of boyd’s talk: “Privacy is a source of tremendous tension and anxiety in Big Data,” says Danah Boyd, a senior researcher at Microsoft Research. Speaking last week at a conference on Big Data at the University of […]

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…

Computing at the USA Science & Engineering Festival

May 1st, 2012 / in conference reports, CS education, pipeline, research horizons, Research News, resources / by Erwin Gianchandani

Computing was among the excitement this past weekend at the 2nd Annual USA Science & Engineering Festival, held at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, DC. The festival is the largest celebration of science and engineering in the U.S. and featured over 500 exhibits and 75 performances and shows on multiple stages. The National Science Foundation (NSF) was an Einstenium sponsor of the Festival and supported a performance stage and the participation of 16 projects, including the SpelBots. The SpelBots are a team of students with an interest in robotics from Spelman College, a female historically black college, and were formed to inspire and encourage young women and underrepresented students […]

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):

Computer Science at the World Economic Forum

March 18th, 2012 / in conference reports, policy, research horizons / by Erwin Gianchandani

The following is a special contribution to the CCC Blog by Stephanie Forrest, professor of computer science at the University of New Mexico — and until recently, a member of the CCC Council. Stephanie attended the World Economic Forum’s 2012 Annual Meeting earlier this year, and she writes about her experiences here.  U.S. computer science and engineering was well represented at January’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Several academic computer scientists were invited to participate in sessions known as Idea Labs, each of which was organized around a single theme and institution. Tomaso Poggio and Alex Pentland participated in a session titled “Worms, Machines and Brains with MIT”; Justine Cassell, Pradeep Khosla, Tom Mitchell and Manuela […]

ARPA-E’s Open Call for “Transformational Energy Technologies”

March 16th, 2012 / in big science, conference reports, policy, research horizons, resources / by Erwin Gianchandani

Earlier this month, the Advanced Projects Research Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) released a $150 million funding opportunity open to all breakthrough energy technologies. Individual awards under the Open FOA will range between $250,000 and $10 million. According to the announcement: To address the challenges imposed by the rapidly evolving global energy market, ARPA-E seeks to support transformational research in all areas of energy R&D, including resource identification, extraction, transportation and use, and energy generation, storage, transmission and use in both the transportation and stationary power sectors. Areas of research responsive to this FOA include (but are not limited to) electricity generation by both renewable and non-renewable means, electricity transmission, storage, and distribution; […]