Earlier this month, the CCC, with support from the Knight Foundation, held a visioning workshop on, “The Future of Research on Social Technologies.” The workshop organizers were Motahhare Eslami (Carnegie Mellon University), Eric Gilbert (University of Michigan), and Sarita Schoenebeck (University of Michigan). David Jensen (University of Massachusetts Amherst) supported the workshop as the CCC Council Liaison. The 52 workshop attendees gathered in-person at the Watergate Hotel in Washington, DC. This workshop focused on bringing together scholars from multiple disciplines to reflect on the field’s key findings and to create a roadmap for future research. The workshop centered on the question: What are the key future challenges for research on […]

CCC Council Members David Jensen (University of Massachusetts Amherst), Brian LaMacchia (Farcaster Consulting Group, LLC), Ufuk Topcu (University of Texas Austin), and Pamela Wisniewski (Vanderbilt University), wrote a white paper titled “Algorithmic Robustness,” that has just been published on the CCC Website. The group was part of the Socio-technical Resilience Task Force in 2022-23. Computational systems are pervasive throughout every sector of society, and the authors emphasize the need for such systems to be robust. Robustness is the “sustained performance of a computational system in the face of change in the nature of the environment in which that system operates or in the task that the system is meant to […]

On July 10, CCC responded to a Request for Feedback released by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on Using AI and ML in the Development of Drug and Biological Products. The response was written by two CCC Council Members of CCC’s Computational Challenges in Health Task Force, David Danks (University of California, San Diego), and Mona Singh (Princeton University), and former Council Member Kevin Fu (Northeastern University). The FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER), in collaboration with the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER) and the Center for Devices and Radiological Health (CDRH), including the Digital Health Center of Excellence (DHCoE), released a discussion paper and […]

Mental well-being is essential to a happy life, and especially with the stresses of the pandemic heightening the mental health crisis plaguing the US and the world, research on ways technology can improve mental health has never been more crucial. Technology can be detrimental to users’ mental health, but there are also abundant ways that it can be used to improve mental health. CCC organized a panel, “Improving Mental Health and Supporting Self-regulation with Technology,” that outlined the status of many creative technologies that support people’s mental well-being. The panelists were Dr. Tanzeem Choudhury (Cornell University), Dr. Mary Czerwinski (Microsoft Research), and Dr. Shri Narayanan (University of Southern California). The […]

An individual’s health is an incredibly personal subject, and going to the doctor can be an intimidating and stressful experience. This is especially true for people that are part of groups that the medical system has historically failed. These structural issues in the healthcare system have permeated the algorithms that are increasingly being used in the diagnosis and treatment of patients. CCC organized a panel, “Health Equity: How Can Algorithms and Data Mitigate, Not Exacerbate, Harms?” that addressed these issues. The panelists were Dr. Amaka Eneanya (Fresenius Medical Care), Dr. Mona Singh (Princeton University), Dr. Melanie Moses (University of New Mexico), and Dr. Katie Siek (Indiana University). Dr. Eneanya began […]

Elections that are safe, secure, and verifiable by the public are an essential part of every democratic government. There have been public outcries for changes in the election process in the US and around the world as citizens have been frustrated with the lack of transparency. Election confidence from the majority of the public is not easy to obtain, but the panelists of a CCC-organized panel at the AAAS Annual Meeting made many suggestions on steps we can take to do just that. The panelists of the session, “Emerging Election Technologies Enhancing Integrity, Transparency, and Confidence” were Philip B. Stark (University of California, Berkeley), Josh Benaloh (Microsoft Research), and Poorvi […]