The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Convergence of Data and Computing Task Force, led by CCC Council Members Vasant G. Honavar from Pennsylvania State University, Mark D. Hill from University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Katherine Yelick from University of California at Berkeley, has just released another community white paper called Accelerating Science: A Computing Research Agenda. This white paper seeks to articulate a research agenda for developing cognitive tools that can augment human intellect and partner with humans on the scientific process. The recent advances in sensing, measurement, storage and communication technologies and the resulting emergence of “big data” offer unprecedented opportunities for not only accelerating scientific advances, but also enabling new modes of discovery. However, there is a huge gap […]

President Obama has named 105 researchers recipients of the Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers. This is the highest honor bestowed by the United States Government on science and engineering professionals in the early stages of their independent research careers. Awardees are selected for their pursuit of innovative research at the frontiers of science and technology and their commitment to community service as demonstrated through scientific leadership, public education, or community outreach. Some of the awardees in computer science include Pieter Abbeel, from University of California, Berkeley, Aaron Roth, from University of Pennsylvania, Sayeef Salahuddin, from University of California, Berkeley, Jakita Thomas, from Spelman College, and CCC council member Shwetak Patel, from the […]

The Global City Teams Challenge Tech Jam date has been set! It will take place at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) campus in Gaithersburg, MD on March 22-23, 2016. The Tech Jam will provide opportunities for existing Action Clusters to present their project plans, discuss project measurements, and identify additional Action Cluster partners. NIST is also establishing an international technical public working group to help develop an “IoT-Enabled Smart City Framework” that will identify pivotal points of interoperability across the many existing and deployed architectures. This international group will be holding initial workshops immediately following the GCTC Tech Jam in the United States (March 24-25, 2016) and in […]

Last week we reported that the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) would be a part of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) 2016 Annual Meeting, February 11-15, 2016, in Washington, DC.  CCC Vice Chair Elizabeth Mynatt, from Georgia Institute of Technology, Kentaro Toyama, from University of Michigan, and CCC Chair Gregory Hager, from Johns Hopkins University, presented on The Confluence of Computing and Society: Emerging Themes in Socio-Technical Systems to a standing-room-only crowd of around 80 participants. The growing importance of computing drives us to understand the interaction between computing and sociotechnical systems, we need to think about how we want to frame technological approaches in the context of societal needs or larger social systems. The three different talks went into […]

Artificial intelligence (AI) has captured the public’s imagination for over 60 years, but it has proceeded in fits and starts leading to what has become known as an “AI winter” – a long period of diminished research and funding activity. Until recently, the conventional wisdom has been that new algorithms were the limiting factor in making steady progress towards artificial intelligence. However, recent advances in machine learning, have established that historical algorithms in conjunction with high-performance computers can be used to achieve nearly human-level performance on diverse tasks such as image and speech recognition, language translation, and video game play. In each of these instances rapid progress was facilitated by the […]

The National Library of Medicine (NLM), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), recently published a Federal Register Notice for a national Pill Image Recognition Challenge. NLM seeks YOUR input in developing high-quality algorithms and software that rank known images of prescription pills in the NLM RxIMAGE database by similarity to consumer-quality images of unknown prescription pills. NLM plans to use the submissions in creating a future software system and Application Programming Interface (API) that can be used in identifying an unknown prescription pill from a photo taken of that pill by a smart phone. Parties wishing to participate in the Challenge are provided with a training data set. The submission […]