CCC Council member Maja Mataric from the University of Southern California provided contributions to this post. If we train Artificial Intelligence (AI) to do our work for us it will still need to be periodically checked for errors and random noise. This detailed human oversight is not something we can skip. As AI has more and more power, it will also have more responsibility and the decisions it makes could be deadly if incorrect. We still have so much to learn about building machines that could potentially make life-altering decisions, and we cannot predict what kinds of serious engineering flaws will occur in the future. Michael I. Jordan from the […]

Recently, Bloomberg posted an opinion piece about data ethics. How do we as a community handle data ethically? We know that the amount of data created each day will only continue to increase. What does responsible data sharing and use look like ‒ for a data scientist, a parent, or a business? How are our socioeconomic structures and methods of interaction shaping behavior? How might we ensure that our technologies and practices are fair and unbiased?  These questions are only going to get harder to answer. One idea that is proposed in the article is to have a “Hippocratic Oath” for data scientists. “Just as medical professionals pledge to do no harm, individuals […]

The next WATCH talk, called Why the Census Bureau Adopted Differential Privacy for the 2020 Census of Population, from John M. Abowd, Chief Scientist and Associate Director for Research and Methodology at the U.S. Census Bureau, is Wednesday, June 6th 2018, Noon-1PM EST. Dr. Abowd was the lead author of the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) white paper on Privacy-Preserving Data Analysis for the Federal Statistical Agencies in January 2017.  John M. Abowd is Associate Director for Research and Methodology and Chief Scientist at the United States Census Bureau and the Edmund Ezra Day Professor of Economics, Professor of Statistics and Information Science at Cornell University. At the Census Bureau, he leads a directorate of research centers, each devoted […]

Check out the following Global City Teams Challenge Updates Global Tech Jam 2018 Bringing together forward-looking research institutions, federal agencies, leading private sector companies, and municipalities interested in preparing their infrastructure for the latest technologies to provide better, more equitable services. This three-day conference will feature Transportation/Mobility with participation from other policy areas including Energy/Water/Waste Management, Public Safety, Wireless, City Platform/Dashboard, Data Governance and Exchange, and Agriculture and Rural. When: June 20-22, 2018 Where: Oregon Convention Center, 777 NE Martin Luther King Jr Blvd, Portland, Oregon 97232, USA More Information: See this website U.S. DOE’s $20M Funding Opportunity for Transportation Technology Integration The U.S. Department of Energy’s Vehicle Technologies Office has announced a new […]

The following blog post is by Robotic Materials organizer Nikolaus Correll from the University of Colorado at Boulder. The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) recently sponsored a workshop on “Robotic Materials” in Washington, DC. This workshop was the second in a series of interdisciplinary workshops aimed at transforming our notion of materials to become “robotic”, that is have the ability to sense and impact their environment. Participants were recruited from a diverse set of stakeholders including material and computer scientists, researchers in government labs, industry, government agencies, and policymakers. There was broad agreement that computation will become an important part of future material systems. Computation will allow materials to analyze, change, store […]

The following is a letter to the community from James Kurose, Assistant Director, and Erwin Gianchandani, Deputy Assistant Director, of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Directorate of Computer & Information Science & Engineering (CISE).  Dear CISE Community, The NSF Directorate of Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) is delighted to announce the appointment of Dr. Henry Kautz as the Division Director for our Division of Information and Intelligent Systems (IIS),  effective June 11, 2018. Henry will be joining NSF/CISE from the University of Rochester, where he is a professor and the founding director of the Goergen Institute for Data Science. Previously, he was chair of the computer science department at the University of Rochester; professor […]