The Biden administration today appointed Stefanie Tompkins to run the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) as its 23rd Director. DARPA is a $3.5 billion a year research and development agency of the United States Department of Defense, whose mission is to make pivotal investments in breakthrough technologies for national security. From the press release:  “With nearly eleven years of DARPA service under her belt, Tompkins, a former military intelligence officer in the U.S. Army, has an exceptional understanding of the agency’s culture. From 2007 through 2017, she held multiple positions, including program manager and deputy director of the Strategic Technology Office, a systems-oriented technical office; DARPA chief of staff; […]

The 23rd ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI 2021) will be held in Montreal, Canada October 18-22, 2021. ICMI is the premier international forum for multidisciplinary research on multimodal human-human and human-computer interaction, interfaces, and system development. The main conference themes in 2021 will be behavioral health and virtual connectivity, but other major topics of central interest include human communication and multimodal language/dialogue processing, human-robot/agent interaction, affective computing and social interaction, cognitive modeling, multimodal representations and fusion-based architectures, machine learning for multimodal interaction and system applications, speech, gesture, haptics, olfaction, gaze and vision, multimodal datasets and platforms, mobile and ubiquitous interfaces, interfaces for virtual/augmented reality, smart environments, and assistive technologies. ACM’s ICMI Conference 2021 is pleased to partner […]

The National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, a congressionally-chartered committee charged with reviewing AI and related technologies and making recommendations to address U.S. national security and defense needs, today released its final report, endorsing significant new investments in AI research, strategies for building the AI workforce, and guidance for using AI in warfare while upholding U.S. democratic values. The report is likely to inform policy activity around defense-related AI issues in Congress and at the Department of Defense over the next months and years. Computing Research Association (CRA) Government Affairs Director, Peter Harsha and Nadya T. Bliss, Executive Director of ASU’s Global Security Institute and Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Executive […]

On March 3-4 from 12:00 PM to 5:00 PM ET, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) will convene “Assessing and Improving AI Trustworthiness: Current Contexts, Potential Paths,” a public workshop sponsored by the National Institute of Standards and Technology to help think through this interrelated set of challenges. This workshop will work to produce initial ideas for activities and collaborations by academia, industry, and the public sector to improve the assessment of trustworthiness of AI systems, and recommendations for NIST and similar public bodies. The notion of AI trustworthiness, comprising a wide array of attributes such as robustness, accuracy, fairness, explainability, and privacy, presents a complicated set […]

Contributions to this post were provided by CCC Vice Chair Daniel Lopresti.  AI for Good Global Summit hosted a webinar on AI to Prevent Modern Slavery, Human Trafficking and Forced and Child Labour today and featured Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Executive Council Member Nadya Bliss (Executive Director of the Global Security Initiative at Arizona State University) as well as Alice Eckstein (Programme Manager, Modern Slavery Programme at United Nations University – Centre for Policy Research), Doreen Boyd (Professor of Earth Observation, Faculty of Social Sciences at University of Nottingham), James Goulding (Deputy Director N/LAB, Faculty of Social Sciences at University of Nottingham) and Anjali Mazumder (Thematic Lead on AI, Justice […]

An increasing number of National Science Foundation (NSF) Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) solicitations, including the CISE Core Programs (for which SMALL Projects do not have a submission deadline), are eligible for cloud access via the CloudBank portal to the AWS, Azure, GCP, and IBM clouds. These clouds offer enormous capacity and rich software stacks. Another plus: access through CloudBank is not subject to indirect cost. For further information: An AWS Public Sector Blog post by Deep Medhi (NSF) and Sanjay Padhi (AWS): https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/publicsector/simplifying-access-cloud-resources-researchers-cloudbank/ A webinar featuring Deep Medhi, Sanjay Padhi, and Mike Norman (UCSD; PI of NSF’s CloudBank effort): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtdhxFOrIcM&feature=youtu.be CloudBank: https://www.cloudbank.org/ July 2018 workshop report “Enabling […]