CCC Council Seeks New Members
The Council of the Computing Community Consortium, aka the CCC Council, is seeking nominations for new members. Nominations (including self-nominations) are due on January 14, 2009 and can be emailed to Eric Grimson, Sarita Adve, or Andrew Chien.
So, what is the CCC? It is an organization that helps the research community develop new research opportunities for the field and then works with federal agencies to turn the best ideas into funded programs. The kind of help the CCC is able to provide includes funding for workshops, arrangements for plenary talks at major venues, and assistance in other community-building activities. Randy Bryant and Thomas Kwan, for example, have been leading a CCC-funded visioning activity on “big data” computing. There are also major CCC-funded activities in many other areas, including robotics, education, cyber-physical systems, and more. A complete list can be found at the CCC web site at http://www.cra.org/ccc, with discussion and public input on the CCC blog.
The CCC is still pretty new (established about a year or so by the Computing Research Association), and so its full impact has yet to be felt. But personally I think this is an extremely important organization, and I’m very happy to be a current member of the CCC Council. Computing research has been stupendously successful, creating incredibly impact in almost every facet of scientific research and daily life. And yet, the field seems to be at a crossroads, struggling internally to understand its core while simultaneously reaching out to almost every human intellectual pursuit. Many people in the field are also acutely aware that the public does not understand the answer to the question, “What is computer science?” This lack of understanding hurts not only how we are perceived in the government but also our ability to recruit the best and brightest young people into the field.
I’ll note that I think it extremely important that CMU Computer Science be involved in the CCC. At the same time, the CCC Council is a true working council, which means that what it needs in its members is “people with ideas, judgment, and the willingness to work.” Ideally, the members would come from a broad cross-section of the research community, not just placees like CMU.
So, please get your nominations in!
Peter Lee @ January 2, 2009