The next WATCH talk, called Industry Leaders and Academic Privacy Researchers: Adversaries or Partners? is Thursday, February 16th, from Noon-1pm EST. The presenter is Jules Polonetsky, CEO of the Future of Privacy Forum (FPF), which is a Washington, D.C. based think tank that seeks to advance responsible data practices. FPF is supported by the chief privacy officers of more than 110 leading companies, several foundations, as well as by an advisory board comprised of the country’s leading academics and advocates. FPF’s current projects focus on Big Data, Mobile, Location, Apps, the Internet of Things, Wearables, De-Identification, Connected Cars and Student Privacy. Jules previous roles have included serving as Chief Privacy Officer at AOL […]

The National Science Foundation (NSF) Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) is pleased to announce a distinguished lecture on Wednesday, February 15, 2017 at 2:00PM EST by Computing Community Consoritum (CCC) Council Member Shwetak Patel titled Emerging Role of Mobile Phones in Health.  Shwetak Patel is the Washington Research Foundation Endowed Professor in Computer Science & Engineering and Electrical Engineering at the University of Washington, where he directs the Ubicomp Lab. His research is in the areas of Human-Computer Interaction, Ubiquitous Computing, and Sensor-Enabled Embedded Systems, with a particular emphasis on the application of computing to health and sustainability. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Georgia Tech in 2008. […]

National Science Foundation (NSF) Assistant Director for the Directorate of Computer & Information Science & Engineering (CISE) James Kurose has issued the following letter to the community to request input on federal datasets with potential to advance data science.  Dear Colleague: Through this Dear Colleague Letter (DCL), the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) requests input on possible datasets held by federal departments, agencies, and offices that would be useful in furthering research in data science, including machine learning. Over the past few years, Project Open Data (https://project-open-data.cio.gov/) has sought to identify and share best practices, examples, and software code to assist federal agencies with […]

The following is a blog post from CCC Executive Council Member Ben Zorn from Microsoft Research.  On December 1, 2016, the President’s Commission on Enhancing National Cybersecurity released its comprehensive report containing 53 recommendations that address cybersecurity challenges, in Obama’s words, “… one of the greatest threats we face as a nation.” Over the course of last year, the Commission held numerous public hearings on the topic, which are available in their entirety here. While the report covers many operational challenges that can and should be addressed without the need for new cybersecurity research, there are many challenges discussed in the report that cannot be addressed with existing approaches. Continuing and expanding research in […]

The following Great Innovative Idea is from Stephan Winter from the University of Melbourne. Winter along with his coauthors Niels Agatz from Erasmus University Rotterdam, Ana Bazzan from Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Ronny Kutadinata from the University of Melbourne, Dirk Christian Mattfeld from University of Braunschweig, Monika Sester from Leibniz University Hannover, and Ouri Wolfson from University of Illinois at Chicago were among the winners at the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) sponsored Blue Sky Ideas Track Competition at the ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems 2016 (SIGSPATIAL 2016) in San Francisco, CA. Their winning paper is called Autonomous Public Transportation: Flexible Road Trains. The Innovative Idea The team was fascinated by a […]

The following is a guest blog post from Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council Member Maja J. Matarić from the University of Southern California and past CCC Chair Greg Hager from Johns Hopkins University.  The New York Times released How to Make America’s Robots Great Again, an article that focused on overlooked realities of manufacturing and robotics. American factories hit a manufacturing record in 2016; 85 percent more goods were made than 30 years ago, but this success is due to automation, resulting in one third fewer jobs. At the same time, China is aggressively automating its manufacturing, with massive infrastructure investments in robotics and no public dialog about job loss. […]