The following great innovative idea is from Mayank Kejriwal and Pedro Szekely from the University of Southern California. Kejriwal and Szekely were one of the Blue Sky Award winners at ISWC 2019 for their paper called Co-LOD: Continuous Space Linked Open Data. The Idea The Web has always been thought of as a collection of discrete elements; for example, the number of people with articles on Wikipedia, the number of likes for a post on Facebook, and so on. The collection of open, interlinked datasets (Linked Open Data) that forms the backbone of the Semantic Web is also discrete.  However, modern deep learning and Artificial intelligence methods operate in continuous spaces or in the realm of real numbers. […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) recently sponsored a Blue Sky Ideas Conference Track at the 18th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2019), October 26-30, 2019, in Auckland, New Zealand. The purpose of this conference was to presenting fundamental research, innovative technology, and applications concerning semantics, data, and the Web. The goal of this track was to solicit visionary ideas, long term challenges, and opportunities for the Semantic Web that are outside of the current topics in the field and are not mature or specific enough to be accepted in the regular research track. Awardees Konstantin Todorov “Datasets First! A Bottom-up Data Linking Paradigm“ Mayank Kejriwal and Pedro Szekely “Co-LOD: Continuous Space Linked Open […]

Hackers can use lasers to silently “speak” to any computer that receives voice commands, these include smartphones, Amazon Echo speakers, Google Homes, and Facebook’s Portal video chat devices. Former Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council member Kevin Fu, from the University of Michigan, and his collaborator Takeshi Sugawara, from the University of Tokyo, discovered that it is possible to make microphones respond to light as if it were sound.  This means that anything that acts on sound commands will act on light commands. They found that when they pointed a laser at a microphone and changed the intensity, the light would somehow perturb the microphone’s membrane at that same frequency. The […]

Significant contributions were provided by CRA Director of Government Affairs Peter Harsha and CCC Director Ann Schwartz Drobnis.   Yesterday at a conference of the National Security Commission on AI (NSCAI) in DC, a bipartisan collection of Congressional and agency leaders spoke of the urgent need for the United States to retain its leadership role in Artificial Intelligence in the face of dramatically increased competition from U.S. adversaries. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), noting Russian President Vladimir Putin’s declaration that the nation that leads AI will rule the world, affirmed the priority he believes AI research and education ought to enjoy by teasing a legislative proposal that would create a new […]

Contributions to this post were provided by CCC Chair Mark D. Hill from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and CCC Executive Committee Member Nadya Bliss from Arizona State University. The leadership of the Department of Defense (DoD) tasked the Defense Innovation Board (DIB) with proposing Artificial Intelligence (AI) Ethics Principles for DoD for the design, development, and deployment of AI for both combat and non-combat purposes.  “The mission of the DIB is to provide the Secretary of Defense, Deputy Secretary of Defense, and other senior leaders across the Department with independent advice and recommendations on innovative means to address future challenges through the prism of three focus areas: people and culture, […]

We live in a new world. A world where information can spread fast and without any regard to accuracy. Our challenge as individual citizens is to somehow identify the disinformation from the actual information. Kate Starbird and her team from the University of Washington spend time studying this problem and the impact disinformation can have on society. Starbird recently gave a keynote address at the National Science Foundation 2019 Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace Principal Investigator’s Meeting (SaTC PI meeting ’19) in Alexandria, VA on “Bots and Trolls” — Understanding Disinformation as Collaborative Work. As Starbird said in her talk: Disinformation is not simply false information or just about “bots” or […]