On Wednesday, August 9, 2017 from 12:00 PM to 1:00 PM ET, the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute (VTTI) will host the first webinar in a series of two that explores ways to use the second Strategic Highway Research Program (SHRP 2) safety data. The SHRP 2 safety data was a three-year data-collection effort that produced continuous driving data for over 3,000 drivers, including thousands of safety critical events and a large sample of baseline driving events. The webinar “Video Reduction and Analysis Methods: Part I, Manual Reduction” will offer an overview of manual video reduction techniques. Attendees will learn which approach or combination of approaches might be best for their research project. The first webinar will be […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Convergence of Data and Computing Task Force responded to the National Science Foundation (NSF) Dear Colleague Letter: Request for Information on Future Needs for Advanced Cyberinfrastructure to Support Science and Engineering Research (NSF CI 2030) in April 2017. You can see their response here. Recently, the NSF released all the responses to NSF CI 2030 RFI. This response led to the CCC’s Advanced Cyberinfrastructure for Science, Engineering, and Public Policy white paper. From the white paper: Progress in many domains increasingly benefits from our ability to view the systems through a computational lens. These advances would not be possible without the advanced data and computational cyberinfrastructure and tools for […]

Contributions to this post were provided by Klara Nahrstedt.  Roughly 12% of the global population today lives in 28 megacities, and at least 40 megacities are projected by 2030. Cost-effective management and sustainability of these growing urban areas will be one of the most critical challenges to our society, motivating the concept of science- and data-driven urban design, retrofit, and operation—that is, “Smart Cities”. Recently, the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) in collaboration with the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department Heads Association (ECEDHA) released white papers describing a collective research agenda for intelligent infrastructure. Today, we highlight the final paper from the series called City-Scale Intelligent Systems and Platforms. A Smart City will require intelligent infrastructure that […]

The following Great Innovative Idea is from Jun Zhang and Michael Yip. Their paper called Three-Dimensional Hysteresis Modeling of Robotic Artificial Muscles with Application to Shape Memory Alloy Actuators 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 Robotic artificial muscles are actuators that can make robots move. Unlike electric motors, robotic artificial muscles are compliant and can generate straight contractions just like our biological muscles. Recently, they are increasingly popular in many exciting areas, such as biomimetic robots, soft robots, and safe human-robot interaction. To practically use robotic artificial muscles, it is crucial to have an accurate model […]

Contributions to this post were made by Yigit Menguc from Oregon State University. The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) recently sponsored a workshop at the 2017 Robotics Science and Systems Conference called Material Robotics (MaRo). The goal of the workshop was to bring together researchers in robotics and materials science to learn from each other and identify the research challenges and applications of robotic materials. The original vision of a “robot” introduced by playwright Karel Čapek in 1920 was that of an autonomous machine molded in the image of humans. Interestingly, the play begins with a discussion of the materials that make up the robots and introduces the techniques used to […]

The Amazon Research Awards (ARA) program has opened a call for proposals for the 2017 round of awards in a number of areas including computer vision, general AI, knowledge management and data quality, machine learning, machine translation, and natural language understanding. For the full list of topics, please see this website. The program is open to faculty members in North America and Europe and awards up to $80,000 in cash and $20,000 AWS promotional credits. Submission Requirements Project proposals should be a maximum of 4 pages (single column, minimum 10 pt font), plus 1 page for references, plus CV. All content components (proposal, references, CV) should be composed into a single PDF file. […]