CCC’s mission is to catalyze computing research, and we are always on the lookout for ways to promote visioning about the future of computing across disciplinary boundaries. When I was at the 11th Heidelberg Laureate Forum in Germany, I asked many of the laureates, all of whom have been awarded prestigious prizes in computing based on their groundbreaking technical advancements, about how they collaborate with diverse groups of experts. In response to my question about the best way to collaborate across disciplines and promote visionary thinking, Dr. Vint Cerf, widely known as one of the “fathers of the internet”, first emphasized the importance of in-person collaborations: “It’s when people are […]

Today is day 4 of the 11th Heidelberg Laureate Forum, and throughout the week I have been asking the computing laureates to identify the grandest grand challenges in computing research, and extrapolating grand challenges based on relevant lectures and discussions. Here are some of the challenges that emerged: Increasing Data Efficiency of Computing Systems. Dr. Alexei Efros posited that computers need to require less data to perform well in order to solve a wider range of problems. While children are very good at learning from a few examples, computers are much less data efficient.  Improving Accuracy of Large Language Models. Dr. Vinton Cerf identified hallucination as a significant problem with […]

I am thrilled to share that I am reporting from Heidelberg, Germany this week where I am attending the 11th Heidelberg Laureate Forum as a member of the press. The forum brings together young researchers across mathematics and computing disciplines, and distinguished Laureates that have won significant awards in the fields, to network and learn from one another. The program consists of panels, workshops, lightning discussions, poster sessions, networking opportunities, and more in the beautiful old town of Heidelberg. As a member of the press, I have the opportunity to represent CCC in interviews with many of the incredible laureates, and listen in on groundbreaking lectures and discussions about pressing […]

The CCC Council’s Addressing the Unforeseen Deleterious Impacts of Technology (AUDIT) task force, composed of Nadya Bliss, Kevin Butler, David Danks, Ufuk Topcu, and Matthew Turk, synthesized the two blog posts they released last month into a Whitepaper that has been released today. The paper compels computing researchers to mitigate future potential harms of their technology by anticipating privacy and security concerns, bias’, and more.  Read this fascinating paper, titled “Addressing the Unforeseen Harms of Technology”, here.

The following blog post was written by CCC’s Addressing the Unforeseen Deleterious Impacts of Technology (AUDIT) Task Force This article is the second of two related blog posts on proactively addressing the unforeseen harms of technology. In the previous post, we discussed the importance of addressing the negative consequences of technology and the difference between genuinely unforeseen risks and those that could have been foreseen but remained unacted upon. In this article, we will discuss the importance of proactively designing technology to reduce the potential for both foreseen and unforeseen negative consequences. Mitigating risks in the design phase is a common tenet of software engineering. A 2002 report from the […]

The following blog post was written by CCC’s Addressing the Unforeseen Deleterious Impacts of Technology (AUDIT) Task Force Computing technologies of all stripes have brought enormous benefits to people’s lives, but also significant individual and societal harms. As these technologies become increasingly ubiquitous and powerful, we should expect the potential benefits and harms to grow as well. These shifts raise crucial questions about the foreseeability of impacts of the work of computing researchers and developers, as it is much easier to promote benefits and mitigate harms when they can be anticipated. We can ensure wide access (if beneficial), establish guardrails (if problematic), and much more, but only if we actually […]