This year Smart Cities Week is taking on a big challenge with a month of online virtual collaborative global engagement from October 19-November 10th, 2020. Called “A New Horizon: From Crisis, Opportunity,” it will explore a new horizon with thousands of fellow smart city policy-makers and practitioners. “Though our name specifies smart cities, innovative technologies are in demand at all levels of government—from innovation districts and port authorities to states, provinces and federal agencies.The smart cities ecosystem is extensive, involving numerous external stakeholders and collaborators – nonprofits, academics, financiers and private sector smart city specialists among them. Expect to connect with people from a wide range of sectors and disciplines, […]

In an effort to prepare for the next pandemic and perhaps aid in the current one, the Computing Community Consortium (CCC), along with the National Academy of Engineering, hosted a virtual workshop entitled Role of Robotics in Infectious Disease Crises on July 9-10, 2020. Organized by Gregory Hager (The Johns Hopkins University), Vijay Kumar (The University of Pennsylvania), Robin Murphy (Texas A&M University), Daniela Rus (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), and Russell Taylor (The Johns Hopkins University), the workshop consisted of over forty participants including representatives from the engineering/robotics community, clinicians, critical care workers, public health and safety experts, and emergency responders. Today we are pleased to release the resulting report […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is pleased to announce the sponsorship of a Blue Sky Ideas Conference Track at the 20th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS-2021) on May 3-7, 2021.  The emphasis of this special track is on visionary ideas, long-term challenges, new research opportunities, and controversial debate. It serves as an incubator for innovative, risky, and provocative ideas, and aims to provide a forum for publishing and presenting these without being constrained by the result-oriented standards followed in the review process of the main track of the conference. Research visions and ideas could cross disciplines, envisioning new ideas, and directions relevant for Agents and Multi-Agent […]

Check out this recent podcast from the official podcast of the Santa Fe Institute (with a somewhat unorthodox title based on this book) that attempts to illuminate important aspects of communication and misinformation.  Host Michael Garfield talks with Former SFI External Professor Carl Bergstrom and Jevin West, both at the University of Washington, who recently translated their undergraduate course on Calling [BS] into a book from Penguin Random House.  From the episode description:  “In this episode, we discuss their backgrounds and ongoing work in the evolutionary dynamics and information theory of communication, how to stage a strong defense against disinformation, and the role of scientists and laypeople alike to help […]

Krysta Svore, Microsoft, will present “Enabling the quantum revolution- pioneering advances to achieve quantum computing & impact at scale,” part of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Computer & Information Science & Engineering (CISE) Distinguished Lecture Series on October 8th, 2020, from 11:00AM to 12:00PM ET. Dr. Krysta Svore is General Manager of Quantum Systems at Microsoft. She believes empowering people with the power of quantum computing, today and tomorrow, will be one of the greatest revolutionary steps in our history. She leads a team dedicated to realizing a commercial-scale quantum computing system and ecosystem to solve today’s unsolvable problems. She spent her early years at Microsoft developing machine-learning methods for web applications, including ranking, classification, […]

While the Computing Research Association’s Computing Community Consortium (CCC) works to catalyze the computing community for the public good, we have rarely prepared talks suitable for the non-computer-scientist public. Fortunately, CCC Chair Emeritus Mark D. Hill of the University of Wisconsin-Madison recently prepared a well-received general-audience talk for Participatory Learning And Teaching Organization (PLATO), a senior organization that arranges informative lectures, classes, and field trips, all virtual now. Prof. Hill’s one-hour talk has the immodest title “How Computing May Change Our World” (YouTube Video & Slide PDF). It discusses that, while computing has already changed how we communicate, work, and play, more big impacts are afoot. Prof. Hill gives insight […]