Significant contributions to this post were provided by CCC Senior Program Associate, Khari Douglas.  The Marconi Society, a nonprofit chaired by Vint Cerf and dedicated to bridging the digital divide, held a virtual symposium on Friday, October 22nd, to celebrate the newest Marconi Fellow Andrea Goldsmith.  Friday’s symposium was really a call to action for the computing, and specifically networking, community. The three keynote speakers Doreen Bogdan-Martin (International Telecommunications Union), Jessica Rosenworcel (Federal Communications Commission), and Andrea Goldsmith (Princeton University) all made the case for the urgent, pressing need for expanding access to connectivity.  In her keynote, Bogdan-Martin stated that 3.7 billion people still have no online connectivity, which is […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) recently sponsored a Blue Sky Ideas Conference Track at the 23rd ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI), October 18-22nd, 2021. The emphasis of this special track was on innovative, visionary, and high-impact contributions. ICMI looked for submissions that went beyond the usual research paper to present new visions to stimulate the community to pursue innovative new directions. First place: Sandy Pentland (MIT), “Optimized Human-A.I. Group Decision Making: A Personal View” Second place: Georgios Rizos (Imperial College London), “Towards Sonification in Multimodal and User-Friendly Explainable Artificial Intelligence” Third place: Philippe Palanque (Université Paul Sabatier – Toulouse), “Dependability and Safety: Two Clouds in the Blue Sky of Multimodal Interaction” CCC provides […]

The One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence (AI100) has released their second report, following their first report in 2016. Five years later, a lot more has been written in the computing research community about the state of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its impact on society. This study, however, remains unique. It is written by a Study Panel of core multi-disciplinary researchers in the field. The authors are firmly rooted within the field of AI and provide an “insider’s” perspective. Second, it is a longitudinal study, with reports by such Study Panels planned once every five years, for at least one hundred years. Quoting from their announcement: Whereas the first […]

The following is a recent message to the community from Lynne E. Parker, Director of the National Artificial Intelligence Initiative Office and Assistant Director of Artificial Intelligence at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). Dear Colleagues, I’m happy to report that OSTP released a blueprint for a National Strategic Computing Reserve.  This concept is modeled after the highly successful COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium, which advanced COVID-19 research during the early days of the pandemic. Report direct link: https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/National-Strategic-Computing-Reserve-Blueprint-Oct2021.pdf NSTC site which includes the new report: https://www.whitehouse.gov/ostp/nstc/ OSTP tweet link: https://twitter.com/WHOSTP/status/1445440967264321536 Feel free to share the news with your interested colleagues. Best regards, Lynne

The following is joint Dear Colleague Letter from Assistant Directors at the National Science Foundation about innovative solutions to climate change. The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) released a whitepaper in August 2021 on Computing Research for the Climate Crisis, coauthored by Nadya Bliss (Arizona State University), Elizabeth Bradley (University of Colorado Boulder), and Claire Monteleoni (University of Colorado Boulder and a CCAI Advisor), to highlight the role of computing research in addressing climate change-induced challenges. See the full whitepaper here.  Dear Colleagues: This Dear Colleague Letter (DCL) encourages the science and engineering communities to develop forward-thinking research that will demonstrably aid in the Nation’s goal of reaching net-zero greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions […]

The following is a message from National Science Foundation (NSF) Software and Hardware Foundations (SHF) Program Directors Nina Amla, Anindya Banerjee, and Sol Greenspan. Dear Colleagues, Here are a few important program announcements from the Software and Hardware Foundations (SHF) program. The new CISE Core solicitation for Small and Medium Core projects has been released. This new solicitation (NSF 21-616) should be used for all new submissions to the SHF Core program. Please see the solicitation for more details here. A few important things to note in this new solicitation: Medium projects still have a deadline – this is now the window of December 1 – December 22, 2021 Small projects continue to have no […]