Katy Dickinson

GHC Presentation: Introducing the Computing Community Consortium

"Introducing the Computing Community Consortium - Facilitating Visions for Our Future" was a presentation I attended this first afternoon of the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing here in Orlando, Florida. Susan Graham of U.C. Berkeley presented information about the newly-created Computing Community Consortium (CCC) which is funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and was established by the Computing Research Association (CRA). CCC is to create venues for community participation in developing research visions and stimulating new research activities. The CCC website says:

Under an agreement with the National Science Foundation, CRA will establish a consortium of computing experts that will provide scientific leadership and vision on issues related to computing research and future large-scale computing research projects. Under the three-year, $6 million agreement, CRA will create the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) to identify major research opportunities and establish “grand challenges” for the field. The CCC will create venues for community participation for developing visions and creating new research activities.

It is interesting (if confusing) to listen to unfamiliar professional jargon. Although I helped to teach a class at U.C. Berkeley Engineering for many years, I have never formally been a part of a university. I have also never worked for the government. So, the steady flow of new acronyms and organization/funding assumptions used in describing CCC took some immediate mental translation. In fact, because of these language barriers, I am not entirely sure I understand how CCC works, so this is a hard blog entry to write.

As an example of the kind of research CCC supports, Jen Rexford of Princeton talked about Geni (Global Environment for Network Innovations), a project with the goal of creating an academic grass-roots community to improve Information Technology infrastructure. Creating a new Internet, thinking from scratch to create a new long-term vision, seems to be at least part of Geni's work. More on the Geni initial design and science plan is available. Dr. Rexford said that the research community needs to think big to play a lead role in how the Internet will evolve.

I asked about the relationship of this academic research community with the open source community as well as with industry. I wanted to know if CCC's visionary work was mostly to be done by academic researchers or would include a larger technical community. In my question, I used the example of Sun's OpenSolaris open source community to illustrate the kind of work and complex communication that goes into creating technology collaboratively. From Dr. Graham's answer, I think that CCC will mostly focus on academic work but individual CCC projects will get some input from industry. Dr. Graham said that industry had a shorter term vision while the academic research community developed visions more than 5 years out. In my experience, industry does create longer-term visions. We talked after the presentation and I hope to discuss the question further.

Official GHC 2007 Blogger. You may comment on this blog by visiting the GHC Forum. You can find me at http://blogs.sun.com/katysblog.

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Posted at 07:41PM Oct 18, 2007 by katysblog in Hopper - Anita Borg Institute  |