CCC Launches Blog

News

A new blog of interest to the computer science community has been launched, called the CCC Blog (http://www.cccblog.org). This blog, by the Computing Community Consortium (CCC), has the goal of creating a forum for discussion of “longer range, audacious research challenges” in the computing field.

Check it out! The plan, initially, is to have about two articles a month, with each article providing (possibly opinionated) commentary on emerging research ideas.

So, who is the CCC and why did they create this blog? Well, quoting the CCC web page:

The goal of the Computing Community Consortium is to catalyze the computing research community to debate longer range, more audacious research challenges; to build consensus around research visions; to evolve the most promising visions toward clearly defined initiatives; and to work with the funding organizations to move challenges and visions toward funding initiatives.

In a nutshell, the CCC’s goal is to put the impetus for major new funding programs into the hands of the research community. The Computing Research Association (CRA) is the parent organization of the CCC, providing both fiscal and policy oversight to ensure that CCC activities go forward with maximum value for the computing research community.

As you might imagine, there are at least two major challenges for the CCC. One is to raise the money needed to support workshops and other “visioning” activities. On this point, the CRA was able to work with the National Science Foundation to obtain a grant to get off the ground. The second major challenge is to stimulate community discussion/debate and find ways to build consensus. The blog is one of the mechanisms being tried for this. While it is far from clear that the CCC Blog will get enough readers to stimulate the kind of discussions that are needed, I think, personally, that it is a good thing to try.

Please check it out and comment! You’ll see that the current article is on the “Big Data” computing concept, led by Randy Bryant and others. There are other ongoing activities as well, in areas such as robotics, CS education, etc. Watch the blog for future comments/opinions on these activities.

Peter Lee @ May 13, 2008