What’s Going on at the Computing Community Consortium (CCC)

By CCC Staff

New Council Members

The CCC Council is comprised of 20 members who have expertise in diverse areas of computing. They are instrumental in leading CCC’s visioning programs, which help create and enable visions for future computing research. Members serve staggered three-year terms that rotate every July.  The Computing Research Association, in consultation with the National Science Foundation, has appointed six new members to the Computing Community Consortium Council, who began their terms this July 1:

• Lorenzo Alvisi, University of Texas at Austin
• Vasant Honavar, Pennsylvania State University
• Jennifer Rexford, Princeton University
• Debra Richardson, University of California—Irvine
• Klara Nahrstedt, University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign
• Ben Zorn, Microsoft Research

The CCC, CRA and NSF thank those Council members whose terms ended on June 30 for their exceptional dedication and service to the CCC and to the broader computing research community:

• Edward Lazowska, University of Washington; founding Chair of CCC
• Anita Jones, University of Virginia, founding member of CCC
• Deborah Crawford, Drexel University
• Fred Schneider, Cornell University
• Josep Torrellas, University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign

With the rotation of new Council members, a new Executive Committee was formed to lead the Council:

• Greg Hager, Johns Hopkins University (Chair)
• Elizabeth Mynatt, Georgia Tech (Vice Chair)
• Liz Bradley, University of Colorado, Boulder
• Mark Hill, University of Wisconsin, Madison
• Bob Sproull, formerly Sun Labs

Aging in Place Workshop

The CCC will hold a workshop on Aging in Place that will bring together needed interdisciplinary expertise, assess the state of the science at the human, medical, and technology levels, and articulate a research vision for a systems engineering approach to the development of technologies and solutions to support the home management of persons with significant chronic diseases and their family care providers. Effective home management of such chronic diseases as dementia, heart failure, hypertension, chronic obstructive airway disease (COPD), and asthma would reduce hospitalizations and other healthcare costs and improve quality of life. Currently, there is a paucity of research in these aging in place technologies (AiPT) from a systems approach that includes the expertise of both health and computer science. This workshop will discuss challenges and opportunities and provide a research agenda regarding the next steps needed in the development and application of technology to home management of chronic diseases.

The workshop will be held September 10-11 in Bethesda, MD.  For more information on this workshop, please visit our website or contact Ann Drobnis (adrobnis@cra.org).

Uncertainty in Computation Workshop

The CCC will hold a workshop on Uncertainty in Computation to discuss the future research directions related to the modeling of uncertainty in computations and the ways in which the uncertainty inherent in many computational processes can be communicated to those tasked with making decisions based on such data.  Uncertainty quantification for computational simulations is a maturing discipline, but little study has yet gone in to the relationship between uncertainty quantification and the communication of uncertainty to decision makers. Data analytics is rapidly becoming far more sophisticated and enjoying widespread use, but is still largely lacking in well principled methods for quantifying uncertainty associated with the information contained in large data sets.  The field of decision science recognizes the importance of understanding decision making under uncertainty, but much of this work is not closely integrated with either formal uncertainty quantification or the explosion of computational uncertainty associated with data analytics.

The workshop will address these issues in two ways.  A set of research challenges will be defined that, if solved, will make the computation and utilization of uncertainty more ubiquitous in a variety of computing applications and systems.  In addition, joint goals and methods between different disciplines identified to help establish an interdisciplinary agenda for addressing challenges that uncertainty poses.  Success in these efforts will accomplish better decision making through a better understanding of uncertainty, better understanding of models and their accuracy by data analysis and simulation scientists, and increased credibility of computational estimates and simulations by the public through better understanding of uncertainty.

The workshop will be held October 15-16 in Washington, DC.  For more information on this workshop, please visit our website or contact Ann Drobnis (adrobnis@cra.org).