There has been a tremendous amount of press on the astonishing advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) and the negative impacts that it could have on our society. Former Computing Community Consortium (CCC) council member, Eric Horvitz recently published a piece about the Benefits and Risks of Artificial Intelligence. Others have commented that AI could take our jobs and even potentially kill us. Elon Musk, Tesla chief executive, called artificial intelligence our biggest existential threat at the MIT Aeronautics and Astronautics department’s Centennial Symposium in October. I think we should be very careful about artificial intelligence. If I were to guess like what our biggest existential threat is, it’s probably that. So we need to be very […]

The 2015 NSF Early-Career Investigators Workshop on Cyber-Physical Systems in Smart Cities will be held in Seattle, WA on April 13-17, 2015. This year’s workshop is implemented in conjunction with the IEEE/ACM CPS Week 2015 – the idea is that participants of the 2015 ECI-CPS workshop will also be able to attend CPS Week 2015. The purpose of the early-career workshop is to identify, develop, and strengthen the CPS research community, particularly in the emerging area of Smart Cities. Participation in this workshop is thus prioritized for early-career researchers (i.e., senior Ph.D. candidates, postdoctoral fellows, research scientists, and assistant professors). Participation and contribution is encouraged from all research disciplines, including computer and […]

The following guest blog post is contributed by Ph.D. students Nick Doty and Richmond Wong working with Deirdre Mulligan from the University of California Berkeley School of Information.  For years, lawmakers, advocates and engineers have touted the potential benefits of Privacy by Design, of integrating privacy throughout the technical design process rather than an after-the-fact. Nonetheless, we still struggle with how to practice Privacy by Design, whether it’s how to conceptualize privacy, how to build privacy in the engineering process, how to present those privacy designs to users or how to incentivize practice of and compliance with Privacy by Design. In order to identify a shared research vision to support these different facets of the practice of Privacy by […]

60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl interviewed Dan Kaufman, Director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)’s Information Innovation Office (I2O), for the following clip called Nobody’s safe on the Internet which aired on February 8th. The 13 minute clip highlights how hacking is now a matter of national security, something many in the computer science community have been saying for a long time. As our society continues to become more technologically advanced the situation will only become more serious. Internet connectivity will become embedded in everything from our baby monitors to refrigerators, through Internet of Things technologies, and our privacy and security to be compromised. This is an issue that is beginning […]

The Forbes 30 Under 30, is a tally of the brightest stars in 20 different fields under the age of 30. What these young men and women have accomplished in their lifetime is astonishing. Now is the time to be young and ambitious! Here are just a few examples: Sophie Milam, 26, Chief Engineer at HI-SEAS, designs control systems for so-called tensegrity robots (held together by tension).   Elizabeth Beattie, 24, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Pennsylvania School of Engineering and Applied Science, designed the Titan Arm, an exoskeleton that gives the wearer an extra forty pounds of bicep strength.   John Mittermeier, 29, a Ph.D. candidate at Oxford University, is applying […]

The Global City Teams Challenge, an initiative by National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and US Ignite, is designed to advance the deployment of Internet of Things (IoT) technologies within a smart city / smart community environment around the world. More than 30 teams are pursuing projects related to sectors including public safety, energy and transportation. Participants in the Global City Teams Challenge are working to deploy an emerging technology within a cyber physical system (CPS) by June 2015. On February 12-13, 2015, NIST and US Ignite will host a Tech Jam that will provide existing teams with an opportunity to present their project plans and identify additional project […]