Over the last year, as part of CRA’s CCC program, a group of researchers has formulated a national roadmap for robotics. Robotics programs over the past decade have been scattered across agencies with little or limited cohesion. In 2006, a group of senior community members requested support from the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) to generate a roadmap that would address not only basic research, but national needs ranging from basic research to industrial needs. A series of four workshops were organized during the summer of 2008 to formulate the roadmap.

On March 25, federal policy-makers and computing researchers came together for the CCC-organized symposium “Computing Research that Changed the World: Reflections and Perspectives” (http://www.cra.org/ccc/locsymposium) to examine the game-changing computing research advances of the past two decades and to extract lessons for structuring future programs to sustain that remarkable track record. Through the kind auspices of Congressman Bart Gordon (D-TN), Chair of the House Science Committee, the symposium was held in the Members Room of the Library of Congress, a spectacular venue.

The Computing Community Consortium (http://www.cra.org/ccc/) was established by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to enable the computing research community to build research communities focused on exciting new visions for computing research. One piece of this effort is the funding of area-specific workshops in which researchers and potential funders come together to discuss research visions, lay out research road maps, and increase momentum for the area. Here we provide a brief synopsis of the ongoing efforts.

Computing Research News interviews Ed Lazowska, Bill & Melinda Gates Chair of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington, and Chair of the Computing Community Consortium. Short articles on the CCC in its formative stages appeared in the November 2006 and May 2007 issues of CRN.