On February 19-20, 2019 the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) co-sponsored the Code 8.7: Using Computation Science and AI to End Modern Slavery with the United Nations University Centre for Policy Research, The Alan Turing Institute, Tech Against Trafficking, University of Nottingham Rights Lab, and Arizona State University Global Security Initiative. Code 8.7 brought together computer science researchers and technologists with policy researchers, law enforcement officials, and activists involved in the fight against human trafficking. Code 8.7 was named after Target 8.7 of the Sustainable Development Goals. With Target 8.7, 193 countries agreed to take immediate and effective measures to end forced labor, modern slavery, and human trafficking by 2030, and the worst forms of child […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) recently sponsored a Blue Sky Ideas Conference Track at the 33rd Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-19), January 27- February 1, 2019, in Honolulu, Hawaii. The purpose of this conference was to promote research in artificial intelligence (AI) and scientific exchange among AI researchers, practitioners, scientists, and engineers in affiliated disciplines. The goal of this track was to present ideas and visions that can stimulate the research community to pursue new directions, such as new problems, new application domains, or new methodologies. First place: Pat Langley (Institute for the Study of Learning and Expertise) Explainable, Normative, and Justified Agency Second Place: Francesca Rossi (IBM Research & University of Padova) and Nicholas Mattei […]

This is a blog post by CCC Chair Mark D. Hill of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  As readers on the CCC blog know, the Meltdown and Spectre microprocessor design flaws revealed in early 2018 made clear that many, if not most, computer systems can leak sensitive information via implementation timing “channel.” Fortuitously and concurrent with this revelation, the US National Science Foundation had commissioned a March 2018 workshop on “Side and Covert Channels in Computing Systems” led by Guru Prasadh Venkataramani of George Washington University and Patrick Schaumont of Virginia Tech. The report has just been issued. It provides too many research recommendations to summarize here, but let me whet […]

The Computing Community Consortium’s (CCC) Industry Working Group has released their Evolving Academia/Industry Relations in Computing Research: Interim Report. In 2015, the CCC sponsored an industry round table that produced the report “The Future of Computing Research: Industry-Academic Collaborations”. Since then, several important trends in computing research have emerged such as the dramatic increase in undergraduate computer science enrollment, the increased availability of information technology, and the rising level of interactions between professors and companies, which has led to the sharing of critical industry resources (such as cloud computing and data). This report considers how these trends impact the interaction between academia and industry in computing fields. The interim report […]

The following blog post is from CCC Chair Mark D. Hill of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Kelvin Droegemeier recently gave his first speech as the Head of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) at the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences (AAAS) 2019 annual meeting in Washington, DC. He is a meteorologist who has done substantial computer modeling and the first non-Physicist to lead OSTP. See the 42-minute video of his talk here. He called for all of us to continue our quest regarding Science’s “Endless Frontier” from Vannevar Bush’s eponymous 1945 report, beginning with a “portfolio analysis” of the US’s tremendous scientific strengths. For those of us […]

Last week I shared my interview with Thermodynamic Computing workshop organizers, Tom Conte (Georgia Tech) and Todd Hylton (UC San Diego) and workshop participant Christof Teuscher in What is Thermodynamic Computing? Part 1. Part 2 of What is Thermodynamic Computing? is now available for streaming or download on Soundcloud (embed below), or you find it on iTunes | Spotify | Stitcher | Google Play. In this episode I interview workshop organizer, Natesh Ganesh, a PhD student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst who is interested in the physical limits to computing, brain inspired hardware, non-equilibrium thermodynamics, and emergence of intelligence in self-organized systems. He was awarded the best paper award at IEEE ICRC’17 for the paper  A Thermodynamic Treatment of Intelligent Systems. I also speak with workshop participant […]