Computing Community Consortium (CCC)

Over the past couple of years, a group of us helped bootstrap the Computing Community Consortium (CCC), as part of the Computing Research Association (CRA), with funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF). 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.

Creation of the CCC was motivated by a concern several of us have, namely, the need to rebalance the portfolio of computing research. If I were to draw an analogy with managing a retirement account, investing in U.S. Treasury bills is low risk (well, maybe not as low as it once was) but has a limited return on investment. Conversely, sinking all of one's money into a Silicon Valley startup has a high potential payoff, but one also has a very high risk of losing the entire retirement fund. Research, like many other things, is similar – one wants a mix of mix/reward quotients, a balanced portfolio.

The CCC Blog (http://www.cccblog.org) is now up and running. It is intended to be a forum for discussing "longer range, audacious research challenges" in the computing field. The plan, initially, is to have about two articles a month, with each article offering opinions on the future. Several of us will be contributing material.

Comments

[kellyinkansas]

Thanks for pointing this out, Dan.