The following is a Science Editorial from former CCC Council member and AI and Robotics Task Force Co-Chair Eric Horvitz, Head of  Microsoft Research Labs. He is also a past president of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) and cofounded the One Hundred Year Study on AI at Stanford. In an essay about his science fiction, Isaac Asimov reflected that “it became very common…to picture robots as dangerous devices that invariably destroyed their creators.” He rejected this view and formulated the “laws of robotics,” aimed at ensuring the safety and benevolence of robotic systems. Asimov’s stories about the relationship between people and robots were only a few years old […]

The Thirty-Second AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence will be held in New Orleans, Louisiana on February 2-7, 2018. The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers in AI and its affiliated disciplines. AAAI-18 will continue the tradition of previous AAAI conferences with technical paper presentations, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, all selected according to the highest standards. AAAI-18 will also include additional programs for students and young researchers. Important Dates for the AAAI-18 Conference July 1 – September 8, 2017: Authors register on the AAAI web […]

Saturday, July 1st, was the start of a new term at CCC! The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Chair Elizabeth Mynatt and Vice Chair Mark Hill are continuing in their respective roles for another year. The other members of the ’17-’18 CCC Executive Committee include Daniel P. Lopresti, Lehigh University, Jennifer Rexford, Princeton University, and Ben Zorn, Microsoft Research. In addition to a new Exec Committee, six new CCC Council members have joined us for the start of their three-year terms, Nadya Bliss, Arizona State University, Elizabeth Churchill, Google, Juliana Freire, New York University, Keith Marzullo, University of Maryland, Greg Morrisett, Cornell University, and Manuela Veloso, Carnegie Mellon University. The CCC and CRA thank those Council members whose terms ended on June 30th for their exceptional dedication and service to the CCC and to the broader computing research […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) has released a white paper, Research Opportunities and Visions for Smart and Pervasive Health. This paper is an outgrowth of the December 2016 workshop Discovery and Innovation in Smart and Pervasive Health convened to inform leading researchers and policymakers on the successes of Smart and Pervasive Health research activities, the evolution of relevant computing capabilities, and the application of these technical innovations to health and wellness goals. Following that workshop, draft recommendations were presented and discussed at the AAAS annual meeting and the ACM/AMIA Workshop of Interactive Health Systems. The newly released white paper highlights these paradigms and concludes with specific recommendations for the successful […]

In a world where digital Internet technology (Amazon, Ebay, Uber, Airbnb) is transforming traditional industries, the traditional electric energy market is lagging significantly. A move towards a true digital grid is needed. 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. We will be blogging about each paper over the next few weeks. Today, we highlight the Digital Grid: Transforming the Electric Power Grid into an Innovation Engine for the United States white paper. A new and substantial investment is needed to develop the new Digital Grid. Radical reductions in the cost of sensors, communication, information processing, […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) has been working hard on various white papers over the past couple of months and slowly releasing them. You can see all of them here. Today, we highlight another paper, called Big Data, Data Science, and Civil Rights by Solon Barocas, Elizabeth Bradley, Vasant Honavar, and Foster Provost. Government, academia, and the private sector have increasingly recognized that the use of big data and data science in decisions has important implications for civil rights. However, a coherent research agenda for addressing these topics is only beginning to emerge and the need for such an agenda is critical and timely. Big data and data science have begun […]