Updates from the Computing Community Consortium
The role of CRA’s Computing Community Consortium is to assist the computing research community in envisioning and enabling new high-impact research directions. Here are some key activities since our last report two months ago:
CCC organized a “Challenges and Visions” track at the 6th Biennial Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research, January 6-9 in Pacific Grove, CA – the ninth in a series of such tracks at major conferences in the field. See others here. Proposals for additional “challenges and visions” tracks are welcome!
On January 15-‐16, 2013 the Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC), NSF and CCC held a workshop onConvergence of Software Assurance Methodologies and Trustworthy Semiconductor Design and Manufacture. The workshop brought together academic and industry experts from the programming language and semiconductor design/ manufacturing communities to discuss challenges to securing the semiconductor manufacturing process. More information on the workshop can be found here. Proposals for research visioning workshops are always welcome! Further information here.
On January 17, the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology released its latest assessment of the Federal Networking and Information Technology Research and Development Program. The Working Group for this report was co-chaired by CCC Vice Chair Susan Graham. (The working group for the 2010 PCAST report, which this report updates, was co-chaired by CCC Chair Ed Lazowska.) Further information here.
The February issue of CACM carried an article by CCC Council member Anita Jones on “The Explosive Growth of Postdocs in Computer Science.” This is a follow-up to the CCC-initiated CRA “Best Practices” memo on Computer Science Postdocs, adopted in December. CCC believes this to be an issue of great importance to our field.
On February 11-‐12, 2013 CCC held a workshop on Multidisciplinary Research for Online Education(MROE). The workshop was an extension of CCC’s earlier visioning activity on Global Resources for Online Education(GROE), which addressed education-‐relevant research in areas such as intelligent student modeling through data mining, mobile computingfor data logging, social networking, and many other areas, to include research at the interface of computingand the social/behavioral sciences. More information on the workshop can be found here.
A workshop on Privacy R&D was held on March 4.This workshop is a partnership between CCC and Rob Atkinson’s Information Technology and Innovation Foundation.It brought together representatives from industry, academia, and government to discuss developing a consensus statement on the need for a concerted effort to address privacy R&D and developing a strategy for communicating this consensus statement to relevant stakeholders. More information on the workshop can be found here.
As a result of an open solicitation last year, CCC approved a proposal for a set of three workshops on Extreme Scale Design Automation. Participants will discuss a broad set of challenges facing the electronic design community, and how these challenges impact the designand fabrication of new electronic systems (both with conventional CMOS and with emerging technologies). Organization has been completed for the first workshop, to be held on March 7-‐8, 2013, which will focus on emerging technologies and the interplay between graduate educationand the design automation workforce.The second workshop (date TBD) will focus on the challenges of system design with many billions of transistors. The final workshop (date TBD) will unify observations made into a series of milestones, benchmarks, and metrics, to help direct future research efforts.
CCC Chair Ed Lazowska testified to the House Science Committee regarding the impact of computing research on February 14, 2013, along with Kathryn McKinley (MicrosoftResearch) and Kelly Gaither (TACC). Information and written testimony here; Lazowska’s oral testimony here.
We are actively seeking nominations for members of the CCC Council. The CCC Council consists of 18 members with staggered 3-year terms. Information here
