The website for submitting applications was taken down on schedule at midnight on June 9, and the reviewing process commenced two days later. We’ve been very busy reviewing ever since, assigning each application to multiple reviewers, to guarantee a minimum of three reviews for each awardee. We are targeting July 10 for completing the review and decision process.

The 526 applications come from 415 145 distinct colleges and universities and specify a total of 949 different applicant-mentor pairs. The mentors span 198 different universities, companies, and non-profits.

27% of the applicants declare themselves to be female and 62% male. 42% are US citizens and 5% are permanent residents. The two largest international groups are from China (15%) and India (14%). 6% of the applicants are members of an underrepresented racial/ethnic group.

We asked each applicant to specify his or her research subdiscipline. A quick tabulation of the responses is as follows:

• 21%: AI / Machine Learning / Robotics / Vision
• 2%: Communications/Signal Processing
• 3%: Computer Science Education / Educational Technology
• 6%: Databases / Information Retrieval / Data Mining
• 3%: Graphics / Visualization
• 7%: Hardware / Architecture
• 7%: HCI / CSCW
• 7%: Information Assurance / Security / Privacy / Cryptography
• 2%: Information Systems / Information Science
• 5%: Mobile / Ubiquitous / Embedded Computing
• 9%: Networks / Operating Systems
• 3%: Numerical/Scientific Computing / HPC / Data-Intensive Scalable Computing
• 3%: Other (e.g., Quantum Computing, Synthetic Biology, Computational Neuroscience, Technology for the Developing World)
• 3%: Programming Languages / Compilers
• 8%: Scientific/Medical Informatics (includes Bioinformatics, Computational Biology, Clinical Informatics, Public Health Informatics, Chemical Informatics)
• 2%: Social Computing / Social Informatics
• 2%: Software Engineering
• 0% (2): Technology Policy
• 6%: Theory / Algorithms

(It seems clear that a further subdivision of AI/ML/Robotics/Vision into separate areas would provide better information.)

The response by both prospective mentors and applicants far exceeds our expectations! The level of interest has been extremely gratifying, and we truly appreciate the cooperation of almost all of the mentors and recommenders in submitting their endorsements on time. The members of both the Selection Committee and Steering Committee have been working very, very hard on a completely volunteer basis. The CCC’s oversight is working well to ensure broad community input, notification and, ultimately, participation.

We’re all looking forward to making the final decisions, in about two weeks or so …

– Peter Lee and Ed Lazowska

Videos of the presentations (as well as slides) are now available on the symposium website.  See http://www.cra.org/ccc/locsymposium_slides.php for the complete agenda with individual links, or see our YouTube channel, http://www.youtube.com/computingresearch.

Talks at the Symposium included:

• Introductory Session
  • Ed Lazowska (University of Washington), “Changing the World”

• Session 1: The Internet and the World Wide Web
  • Alfred Spector (Google), “Why We’re Able to Google”
  • Eric Brewer (UC Berkeley), “The Magic of the ‘Cloud’: Supercomputers for Everybody, Everywhere”
  • Luis von Ahn (Carnegie Mellon University), “Human Computation”

• Session 2: Evolving Foundations
  • Barbara Liskov (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), “Security of Online Information”
  • Daphne Koller (Stanford University), “Learning to Improve Our Lives”
  • Jon Kleinberg (Cornell University), “Global Information Networks”

• Session 3: The Transformation of the Sciences via Computation
  • Larry Smarr (UC San Diego), “Supercomputers and Supernetworks are Transforming Research”
  • Chris Johnson (University of Utah), “Computing and Visualizing the Future of Medicine”
  • Gene Myers (Howard Hughes Medical Institute), “Zooming In On Life”

• Session 4: Computing Everywhere!
  • Deborah Estrin (UCLA), “Sensing Everywhere!”
  • Pat Hanrahan (Stanford University), “Pixels Everywhere!”
  • Rodney Brooks (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), “Robots Everywhere!”

In the 30+ year history of this award, only one computer scientist has been recognized.  A principal reason is we don’t nominate many people.  Let’s change that!  It’s too early to submit nominations, but it’s not too early to start thinking about who you’d be willing to nominate.

Information on the Waterman Award is on the NSF web here.

The Computing Innovation Fellows (CIFellows) Project will fund as many as 60 such positions. Applications are due very soon: June 9, 2009. Awards are expected to be announced by July 10. Positions will commence in Autumn 2009.

Go to http://cifellows.org to apply to be a CIFellow.

Also: Go to http://cifellows.org to advertise your interest in hosting a CIFellow at your organization.

Individuals who complete the requirements for their PhD from a U.S. institution between May 1, 2008 and August 31, 2009 in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Information Science, or a closely related field are eligible to apply. Applicants must obtain commitments from between one and three prospective hosts/mentors. Hosts/mentors must not be at the same institution as the one granting the PhD. The CIFellows website provides resources for both prospective applicants and host/mentors to announce their interests and availability.

Complete information is available at http://cifellows.org. A poster that you may print and post is available at http://www.cs.cmu.edu/poster/.

– Ed Lazowska, Chair of the Computing Community Consortium Council
– Peter Lee, Incoming Chair of the Computing Research Association

The Computing Community Consortium, working with a remarkable coalition of all the major groups involved in cyberinfrastructure for research and education, has been weighing in heavily on broadband strategy.  This week, the Chronicle of Higher Education featured this group’s position paper, “Unleashing Waves of Innovation.”

Our basic messages - consistent with the position advocated by Microsoft and others:

• Use an aggressive definition of broadband - 100 mbps - in order to be competitive with other nations.
• Focus the initiative on K-12 schools, higher education institutions, libraries, community centers, clinics, and hospitals:  reach a broad range of citizens, and the next generation of innovators and consumers.
• Recognize the historic role of the state and regional networks that grew out of the higher education community in reaching unserved and underserved regions.  In general, neither  telecommunications companies nor state agencies have provided effective leadership.

The recommendations in the “Unleashing” document were reached with remarkable unanimity among individuals and organizations representing a broad range of academic and infrastructure organizations.  The objective is to help shape the approach that will be adopted by the Department of Commerce and the Department of Agriculture in allocating nearly $7 billion in broadband stimulus funds.  A similar task must be undertaken in each and every state - state governments will play a significant role in formulating and prioritizing proposals to Commerce and Agriculture for stimulus funds.

Read the “Unleashing” paper here.  Read the Chronicle article here.

- Ed Lazowska

http://www.cra.org/ccc/locsymposium_slides.php

Videos of all talks will be available soon.

Previous posts describing the symposium are available here and here.

Many thanks to our speakers for preparing and delivering such wonderful talks, and for making their materials available to the community at large.

Inspiration for the program came from a large number of responses from the computing research community to two November CCC blog posts — this was your symposium!

Each of the talks was superb.  Honestly, in 35 years in the field, I’ve never before spent a day with such uniformly high quality of content and presentation.  It was remarkable.  The videos of the 20-minute talks will be a great resource for all of us.

My introductory talk (pdf) provided a quick overview of the impact and promise of the field, as well as a peek at the day’s program.  I drew upon a recent New York Times article describing a Wharton School assessment of “the top innovations of the last 30 years” (more than half of which were direct results of computing research!) as well as a recent CSTB study “Assessing the Impacts of Changes in the IT R&D Ecosystem” (which described a day without information technology as “a day the Earth stood still”).

My closing remarks summarized both the content and the messages of the day-long symposium.  I won’t repeat Susan’s earlier summary of the content, but here are a few additional highlights:

• Alfred Spector commented that “Google did not arise through spontaneous generation in a garage in Palo Alto — it drew upon a broad set of computing research advances.”
• A number of the talks — Luis von Ahn’s, Jon Kleinberg’s, Rodney Brooks’s, probably others — alluded to emerging “hybrid systems”:  humans + computers.
• Daphne Koller presented a terrific catalog of the successes of machine learning.
• Gene Myers asserted that “computation is the bottleneck in every [modern molecular biology] project” — a perfect bookend to Larry Smarr’s session-leadoff talk on the transition to data-intensive science.
• Chris Johnson made it clear that in the past decade, modeling and visualization have become valuable tools in advanced surgical practice — M.D.’s are beating down his door to obtain access.
• Pat Hanrahan presented neat timelines of the transformation of all media — publishing, audio, photography, and video — from analog to digital.
• Rodney Brooks ended the technical sessions on a cautionary note:  The future of robotics is robots that operate in unstructured environments.  America has a wide lead now in this field.  But once, we led in manufacturing robotics, and we allowed that lead to slip away.  Will we allow that to happen again?

That’s a good jumping-off point for the messages of the day.  Here’s my list:

• Computing research truly has changed the world.
• A rich and complex ecology — involving government, academia, and industry — has made America the world leader.
• Research has laid the foundation — you can find federally-funded university-based research at the heart of essentially every billion-dollar sector of the IT industry.
• It consistently takes 10 or 15 years from “research breakthrough” to”billion-dollar sector.” So you need patience — there’s no such thing as “just-in-time research.”
• Often, “products” in IT are created by synthesizing multiple advances — unlike biomedicine, where a single patent can yield a blockbuster drug.
• Often, old ideas gain new life.  We’ve had recent breakthroughs in search and in machine learning, but each traces its roots back at least 40 years.
• While computing research often is motivated by a “strategic objective” — we see a practical value if the research succeeds — we’re often not very good at predicting what the greatest impact of our innovations will be.  Serendipity plays a huge role.  Any attempt to decide early-on what research is “important” is likely a losing proposition.
• While much of the exciting computing research today is interdisciplinary and collaborative, it’s important to have a balanced portfolio:  core + interdisciplinary, single-investigator + team, etc.

The bottom line:  We have an extraordinary track record — America has an IT R&D ecosystem that again and again leads to massive transformations.  And the next ten years can be our golden age:  on March 25th we heard about some amazing recent accomplishments, and we heard from some extraordinary young people (as well as some extraordinary not-so-young people) who are driving the field forward.  The opportunities for impact are greater than they have ever been.  Go out and change the world!

– Ed Lazowska

I’ve just returned from the CCC-organized Symposium on “Computing Research that Changed the World.” (http://www.cra.org/ccc/locsymposium.php) It was a marvelous experience. There were 12 wonderful 15-minute talks that highlighted major achievements in computing in the last 10-20 years, the research advances that enabled them, and the opportunities to move forward in the various fields in the years ahead.

In the morning, Al Spector outlined the technologies that enable us to google, Eric Brewer explained the emergence of the cloud, and Luis von Ahn showed us how captchas are being used to build accurate digital archives of corpuses such as the New York Times. Then Barbara Liskov explained the key ideas and challenges of security in distributed systems, Daphne Koller highlighted some of the myriad applications enabled or enhanced by machine learning, and Jon Kleinberg taught us about the science that underlies social networking and the ways in which those concepts are fueling new applications.

As if that weren’t enough, in the afternoon, Larry Smarr showed some of the major achievements (both scientific and technical) fostered by the nation’s investments in supercomputing for the research community, and highlighted the importance of huge amounts of data and ultra-high bandwidth networking for future progress, Chris Johnson showed us the rapid evolution of visualization techniques and the scientific understanding they have facilitated, and Gene Myers gave a fast summary of genome sequencing past and future and the opportunities to drive progress in molecular biology as a data-driven science. Then Deborah Estrin showed the wondrous new applications that are being enabled by the ubiquity of sensors, and the research challenges that must be met, Pat Hanrahan reminded us of the remarkable evolution of digital media from text to audio to video to photography to HDTV, and Rod Brooks gave us a great summary of the stunning advances in robotics.

The day was spellbinding. I never once opened my laptop. I was reluctant to tell speakers their time was running out when I moderated a session. I was reminded over and over how rich our field is and how fast it continues to evolve. Just as it was when I started out as a student, it’s an exciting time to be in computing.

Through the kind auspices of Congressman Bart Gordon, the symposium was held in the Members Room of the Library of Congress.

It’s a beautiful room, but relatively small, so attendance was limited. But it was a great crowd — some senior C.S. faculty, some junior faculty, key former and current NSF people from CISE, from other parts of the Foundation, and from the National Science Board (including current Director Arden Bement and former Director Erich Bloch), Congressional staffers, and a collection of colleagues from other greater Washington organizations. Congressmen Lipinski and Holt were able to join some of us for lunch.

The sessions in the Members Room were followed by a closing session (more like a reception) in the Madison Room. There were some really cool demos there. Ed Lazowska, who had made the opening remarks in the morning, gave a brilliant summary of the day, despite the challenge of talking in a cocktail party setting. Congressman Lipinski also spoke, and gave those not at lunch an opportunity to meet him.

The speakers did an outstanding job in making their talks accessible to that diverse audience. Consequently, these are great talks to share with student audiences, to show them what computing is really about. Those of you that checked might have noticed that there was no webcasting, but the talks and the discussions that followed were videotaped, and will appear on the CCC website soon. I strongly encourage you to take a look!

– Susan Graham

I finished The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death by Charlie Huston just before the City Archives collapsed in Cologne, Germany, on March 3. I soon found myself at my 11th disaster, but unlike Webb, the protagonist who must come to grips with the events that led him to a janitorial job cleaning up trauma sites, I was clear on why I was there standing in the rain. I was there in the hope that we could make a difference with technology — that we could enable the fire rescue teams to save a life, prevent a responder’s death, or even bring a family’s agonizing wait to closure. Or to help the structural engineers discover and document What Went Wrong. And, if not that, learn something for the next time.

We accomplished option C at least.

Let me offer this photograph as the spoiler alert for my personal blog (rescuerobotics.blogspot.com) which has details, history of robots for building collapses, and some pictures and video. In the picture, I’m on the right, down at the mid-level of the collapse (there were two more stories of flooded or damaged subway structure below us) with the Cologne Chief of the Fire Department, the head of special operations, and the safety officer (all wearing reflective bunker gear). The photo was snapped a few minutes after we had reached the conclusion that robots could not be used. In the photo we are chatting about the collapse, the dangers, the sequence of events that had led to the catastrophe and resulting challenges before clambering up the scaffolding to the safer street level.

Standing there in Germany, I couldn’t help but be reminded of all the ways computing could be applied. Robots. Cyber-physical systems. Sensors to penetrate the rubble and algorithms to process and mine the data. Reliable and secure high bandwidth wireless networks. Optimal resource allocations and scheduling. Mapping and 3D surface reconstruction. Sketch-based and multi-modal interfaces to tablet PCs to make it easier for the experts to express their knowledge. Social networking to help the displaced residents figure out how to adapt, where their friends had been relocated to, what was really going on.

Looking again at the photograph brings me back to the The Mystic Arts. I was particularly touched as to how at the end of the novel Webb comes to view his work as a sacred duty. The disaster “lifecycle” of prevention, preparedness, response, and recovery is a lot like trauma work — it is infrequent, not well-funded or understood, very challenging, and ultimately inevitable.  Standing there in Germany, I glimpsed the journey ahead for the computing community as we, too, embrace the difficult and necessary, and make the field of emergency informatics our sacred duty as computing, well applied, can help erase all signs (and maybe the causes) of death.

– Robin Murphy is a Professor at Texas A&M University, and one of the newest members of the CCC Council. Previously, Robin’s robots also conducted search-and-rescue operations at the World Trade Center shortly after 9/11.

I think that this symposium is really important because with a new administration in Washington, we have people who appreciate the importance of fundamental research. If we increase the size of the funding pie, all of us will benefit. The best way to increase the size of the computing research part of the pie is to link advances in computing research to advances in other fields and the larger society.

That is what the March 25 symposium is about. With the cast of speakers we have lined up and the number of people from government agencies and Congress who will be attending, we have a great chance to make a difference. Check out the program; we had to keep the invitation list small due to the location, but all the talks will be recorded.

– Greg Andrews