Tag Archive: CCC Blog
Items from the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Blog.
The following is a special contribution to this blog by Josep Torrellas, Professor at the Departments of Computer Science and (by courtesy) Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the Director of the Center for Programmable Extreme Scale Computing, and the Director of the Illinois-Intel Parallelism Center (I2PC). Josep is a member of the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council.
I’m on sabbatical this year and have been visiting computer science departments at colleges and universities, small and large. One of the recurring stories that I hear is that a growing number of non-majors are choosing to take introductory CS courses. And, some of these students get so excited that they choose to take a second CS course. Although this results in large courses and staffing headaches, it is generally viewed as a good “problem” to have.
All you have to do is create the PERFECT March Madness bracket. If you manage to do so, Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway will pay you $1,000,000,000, as reported by ESPN! While the idea is certainly appealing, creating a perfect bracket is near impossible (the chances of winning are 1 in 4,294,967,296).
Recently, ScienceCareers named “Three Can’t Miss Science Careers,” and Ph.D. computer scientist was on the list along with geoscientist, and physician scientist. The article identified these fields in which a degree “virtually guarantees solid career prospects” and explored recent hiring and salary trends.
Last month, Google announced the recipients of its Summer 2013 Research Awards, and two former Computing Innovation Fellows (CIFellows) were among the winners: Mohit Tiwari and Katrina Ligget. These awards are made to researchers in computer science which cover tuition for graduate students and provide the opportunity to work with Google scientists and engineers. Tiwari was a 2011 – 2013 CIFellow at the University of California, Berkeley. He is now an Assistant Professor at University of Texas at Austin. He discusses his path as a CIFellow and his Google Research Award below.
From the CCC Blog post on July 16: It’s impossible to convey how great this year’s Microsoft Research Faculty Summit has been: a “who’s who” of attendees from academia; heavy participation by top people from Microsoft Research; superb presentations on a range of research topics; and a total absence of marketing.
What is a “better Internet?” The current Internet has been a remarkable success, providing a platform for innovation that far exceeds its original vision as a research instrument. It is well documented that the Internet has transformed the lives of billions of people in areas as diverse as education, healthcare, entertainment and commerce. Yet many of these successes are threatened by the increasing sophistication of security attacks and the organizations that propagate them. A materially more secure Internet would be “better.”
