Last month the Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) program commemorated their 30th Anniversary in Washington D.C. You can read the full event recap here. In an effort to highlight the impact federal investments have had on the computing research community, the event featured five panels in which participants discussed key achievements in the field over the past decade and future directions going forward. Each panel focused on an important subarea of computer research: Computing at Scale, Networking and Security, Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning, Privacy and the Internet of Things and Socially Responsible Computing.    This post is the first in a series highlighting the panels from that day, […]

Scientists at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute (WHOI) have developed robotic buoys located 20 miles off of the coast of Martha’s Vineyard, MA, which are used to detect nearby whales in near real-time. These buoys listen to whale songs using underwater microphones, and compile these songs into spectrograms, or “pitch tracks” which resemble notes on sheet music. The spectrograms are then sent to on-shore servers, where Artificial Intelligence (AI) is used to compare these recordings to existing libraries of whale songs, to identify the species of whale. This data is then examined by human analysts and the detected species and number of whales are recorded in a public database and […]

The NSF Convergence Accelerator has released a new funding opportunity for three new research tracks: Enhancing Opportunities for Persons with Disabilities (Track H), Sustainable Materials for Global Challenges (Track I), and Food & Nutrition Security (Track J).  Track H will focus on improving the quality of life and access to employment and opportunities for persons with disabilities (PWD) and will convene researchers in the fields of social sciences, behavioral sciences, engineering, computer science, ethics, and economics. In 2015, the CCC put on a workshop “Prompting  Strategic Research on Inclusive Access to Rich Online Content and Services” to address challenges and opportunities surrounding access to online content and services, including rich, […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) sponsored a hybrid workshop “Best Practices for Hybrid Workshops” where around 30 participants from the fields of academia, industry, and government were given the opportunity to discuss the costs, benefits, and risks of Hybrid conferences, which have become increasingly prevalent since the beginning of Covid-19. Organized by Sujata Banerjee (VMware), Maria Gini (University of Minnesota), Daniel P. Lopresti (Lehigh University), and Holly Yanco (University of Massachusetts Lowell), this workshop focused on discussing the increased inequities introduced by hybrid conferences, such as difficulties for visually and verbally impaired individuals to follow presentations, the loss of social interaction between conference participants, and problems with incompatible technologies, such […]