National Library of Medicine Director Patti Brennan spoke at the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Leadership in Science Policy Institute (LiSPI) this morning and strongly urged computer scientists to respond to this Request for Information (RFI) to Help Shape the Future of Data Science!  The deadline has been extended to November 20th, 2017! On behalf of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Library of Medicine (NLM) seeks community input on new data science research initiatives that could address key challenges currently faced by researchers, clinicians, administrators, and others, in all areas of biomedical, social/behavioral and health-related research. The field of data science is broad in scope, encompassing approaches for […]

  The ASSETS Paper Impact Award is given every other year to the authors of a paper that was presented at least 10 years ago to an International ACM SIGACCESS Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS) conference and has had a significant and sustained impact in the literature. This year’s Impact Award was given to Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Chair Elizabeth Mynatt and W. Keith Edwards, both from Georgia Tech, and Kathryn Stockton for their paper called Providing access to graphical user interfaces—not graphical screens.  From the 2017 announcement: The Mercator project, described in this paper at the first ASSETS conference in 1994, had a significant and lasting impact on accessibility to graphical user interfaces. […]

CCC Chair Beth Mynatt has contributed to this blog. As computing has grown even more essential to day to day life, the capacity of computing research to effect societal change and address the needs of society has subsequently increased. In convening the Computing Research Symposium, our goal was to grow awareness and enthusiasm for the role that computing research plays in addressing timely and critical societal needs. How can we use artificial intelligence to amplify human abilities? How can intelligent infrastructure strengthen our communities? How do security and privacy promote democracy? How can big data and algorithms ensure fairness? To help answer these questions and more, we held the second […]

The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) is pleased to present the 2017 Fall Symposium Series, to be held Thursday through Saturday, November 9-11, at the Westin Arlington Gateway in Arlington, Virginia. One of the symposia is on Cognitive Assistance in Government and Public Sector Applications. Cognitive Assistance is an important focus area for AI. While it has several facets and still lacks a precise definition (one of the reasons for this Symposium!), it has been called Augmented Intelligence, the automation of knowledge work, intelligence amplification, cognitive prostheses, and cognitive analytics in the past. It is generally agreed that even while fully automated AI is still being developed, there […]

The following Great Innovative Idea is from Osman Dogan Yirmibesoglu, from Oregon State University. His paper called 3D Printing Soft Robots and Design Rules, coauthored by John Morrow and Yigit Menguc, was one of the featured talks at the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) sponsored Material Robotics (MaRo) Workshop at the 2017 Robotics Science and Systems (RSS) Conference. The Idea Capabilities of soft robotic systems are increasing with the development of new manufacturing techniques. And the needs for more soft robots are emerging in the application areas such as biomimicry, cooperative robotics (co-robotics), medical robotics, exploratory robots, etc. To be able to reliably perform in these areas, soft robot control systems and sensors require more attention. In our work, we presented […]

So far the 2017 hurricane season has been disastrous, however, as we learned today at Day 1 of the Computing Research: Addressing National Priorities and Societal Needs Symposium, it could have been even more disruptive if not for current computing research. Plenary speaker Michael Dunaway, from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, explained that hurricane tracks have been very accurate this year. This is because computational models have gotten very good at predicting the direction of the hurricane at the upper atmosphere level. As a result of better predictions, officials decided not to evacuate the city of New Orleans for Hurricane Nate on October 4th because they could trust the predicted track of the storm. This ended up saving the city millions […]