The AAAI 2017 Spring Symposium on AI for Social Good (AISOC) will be March 27-29, 2017 at Stanford University.  A rise in real-world applications of AI has stimulated significant interest from the public, media, and policy makers, including the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). Along with this increasing attention has come media-fueled concerns about purported negative consequences of AI, which often overlooks the societal benefits that AI is delivering and can deliver in the near future. This symposium will focus on the promise of AI across multiple sectors of society. The organizers are especially interested in addressing societal challenges, which have not yet received significant attention by the AI community […]

The DARPA Spectrum Collaboration Challenge (SC2) is the first-of-its-kind collaborative machine-learning competition to overcome scarcity in the radio frequency (RF) spectrum. Today, spectrum is managed by dividing it into rigid, exclusively licensed bands. This human-driven process is not adaptive to the dynamics of supply and demand, and thus cannot exploit the full potential capacity of the spectrum. SC2 aims to ensure that the exponentially growing number of military and civilian wireless devices will have full access to the increasingly crowded electromagnetic spectrum. Competitors will reimagine spectrum access strategies and develop a new wireless paradigm in which radio networks will autonomously collaborate and reason about how to share the RF spectrum, […]

The following is a guest blog by Vasant G Honavar, a Computing Community Consortium (CCC) council member and a Pennsylvania State University professor. The emergence of “big data” offers unprecedented opportunities for not only accelerating scientific advances but also enabling new modes of discovery. Some have gone so far as to suggest that “big data” makes the scientific method that has characterized natural science since the 17th century, consisting of systematic observation, measurement, and experiment, and the formulation, testing, and modification of hypotheses, obsolete. Nothing could be farther from truth.   The reality is that, in many disciplines, the emergence of big data exacerbates the gap between our ability to acquire, store, […]

National Institutes of Health (NIH) funded researchers have more than doubled the knowledge of the functional areas of the human brain. NIH Director, Francis Collins, posted a Director’s Blog about a recent NIH funded study that was reported in the journal Nature, which brings the map of the human brain into much sharper focus. From the blog post: By combining multiple types of cutting-edge brain imaging data from more than 200 healthy young men and women, the researchers were able to subdivide the cerebral cortex, the brain’s outer layer, into 180 specific areas in each hemisphere. Remarkably, almost 100 of those areas had never before been described. This new high-resolution […]

The following blog post is by CCC Vice Chair and University of Wisconsin-Madison Professor Mark D. Hill.  I write about a recent Computer Science and Telecommunications Board (CSTB), an operating unit within the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, workshop report “Continuing Innovation in Information Technology.” This report updates famous “Tire Tracks” diagram for IT (Figure I.1, P. 5). Literally, “tire tracks” is a dense illustration of how federally-funded university research and industrial research and development (R&D) precede the emergence of large IT industries by decades. On one hand, this diagram shows “old” areas like Personal Computers that exceeded $1G annual revenue in the mid-1980s and then exceeded $10G the early 2000s. On the other hand, it […]

There are three National Science Foundation (NSF) webinars this Thursday, July 28th about three different solicitations. Read about them below and register to join one! PAWR Webinar The Platforms for Advanced Wireless Research (PAWR) NSF 16-585 program aims to support advanced wireless research platforms conceived by the U.S. academic and industrial wireless research community. PAWR will enable experimental exploration of robust new wireless devices, communication techniques, networks, systems, and services that will revolutionize the nation’s wireless ecosystem, thereby enhancing broadband connectivity, leveraging the emerging Internet of Things (IoT), and sustaining US leadership and economic competitiveness for decades to come. In order to support the design, development, deployment, and operations of the advanced wireless research platforms, […]