The Information Technology & Innovation Foundation (ITIF) — a non-partisan, Washington, DC-based think tank that aims to formulate and promote public policies to advance technological innovation and productivity globally — has released a short report calling for a R&D roadmap for privacy, together with a companion website enabling researchers to openly collaborate on creating a privacy research agenda. Noting that “effectively addressing privacy concerns … will require a mix of new technologies and policies to ensure data is properly safeguarded and consumers are protected,” the report emphasizes that a roadmap would “help address consumer privacy concerns, better align R&D investments with strategic objectives, and enable more innovation.” According to the report (following the link):

In cooperation with the International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS), the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is pleased to invite submissions to a Challenges and Visions Track at AAMAS 2013, to be held in St. Paul, Minnesota, May 6-10, 2013. The emphasis of this track is on visionary ideas, long-term challenges, and new research opportunities that are outside the current mainstream of the field. In this way, this track will serve as an incubator for innovative approaches, risky and provocative ideas, and to propose challenges and opportunities for the field in the near future.

Judea Pearl received the 2011 ACM A. M. Turing Award “for fundamental contributions to artificial intelligence through the development of a calculus for probabilistic and causal reasoning.” In this guest post, Douglas Fisher, associate professor of computer science and computer engineering at Vanderbilt, summarizes Pearl’s Turing Award Lecture, delivered at last week’s AAAI Conference. Professor Pearl delivered his Turing Award Lecture as the opening invited address at the 26th AAAI Conference in Toronto, Canada, last week. He opened by acknowledging the support of the AAAI community in a great collaborative enterprise, a remarkable “journey” as he said, and he shared the award with the community and his coauthors. He also cited […]

IBM and IEEE have partnered to launch the Smarter Planet Challenge, seeking “creative team-based student projects that can help students at any level learn about applying engineering, science, and other disciplines to solve real world problems.” The competition — which will dole out prizes ranging from $1,000 to $5,000 to the top five entries — allows students to submit either completed projects or ideas in any one of five areas of interest (following the link):

Last month, we noted that eminent computer scientist Bill Wulf had taken the unprecedented step of resigning from the University of Virginia to protest the ousting of UVa president Teresa Sullivan by the university’s Board of Visitors. The Board reinstated Sullivan as president a week later, and since then, many in our community have wondered if Bill would rejoin the UVa faculty. Bill has maintained his stance despite pleas from his colleagues — faculty and administration alike — including Sullivan herself. Yesterday, he publicly released a letter explaining his rationale for not “un-resigning.” Here it is, in its entirety:

The following is a special contribution to this blog by Louiqa Raschid, a professor in the School of Business, Institute for Advanced Computer Studies, Department of Computer Science, and Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology at the University of Maryland, and H.V. Jagadish, Bernard A. Galler Collegiate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Michigan. Louiqa and Jag co-organized a workshop on next-generational financial cyberinfrastructure on July 18-19. Earlier this month, experts in computer science as well as finance gathered outside Washington, DC, to consider the need for a new financial cyberinfrastructure, and to elucidate the computing research challenges that are arising in this increasingly interdisciplinary space. Participants were drawn […]