Tom Dietterich and Eric Horvitz, the current and former president of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), respectively, have co-authored a CACM Viewpoint on the Rise of Concerns of AI: Reflection and Directions, now openly available in the October issue of CACM. Tom Dietterich is the Distinguished Professor and Director of Intelligent Systems at Oregon State’s School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Eric Horvitz is the Distinguished Scientist & Managing Director at Microsoft Research and former CCC Council Member. Drs. Dietterich and Horvitz reflect about the recent rise of anxieties about AI in public discussions and media. They discuss the realities about progress in AI and carefully elucidate several different categories of […]

The following is a special contribution to this blog by Jenn Wortman Vaughan, a senior researcher at Microsoft Research.   Social computing encompasses the mechanisms through which people interact with computational systems like crowdsourcing markets, ranking and recommendation systems, online prediction markets, citizen science projects, and collaboratively edited wikis. Humans are active participants in these systems, making choices that determine the systems’ input, and therefore output. The output of these systems can be viewed as a joint computation between humans and machines, and can be richer than what either could produce alone. Social computing is blossoming into a rich research area, with contributions from diverse disciplines including computer science, economics, […]

This week (September 21-25) is the sixth annual National Postdoc Appreciation Week (NPAW), sponsored by the National Postdoctoral Association (NPA). NPAW, the nation’s largest celebration of postdoctoral scholars, was established with the goal of increasing awareness of postdocs. Institutions are encouraged to plan activities that honor postdocs and recognize the contributions they make to research and development in the United States. The Postdoc Best Practices (Postdoc BP) program is coming into its second year. This project is a joint effort of the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) and the National Science Foundation (NSF), designed to create a set of best practices for postdoctoral researchers (postdocs) in computer science. The Postdocs BP […]

The Anita Borg Institute (ABI), a non-profit organization focused on the advancement of women in computing, has announced the winners of the 2015 Grace Hopper Celebration (GHC) ABIE Awards. Each year, the GHC ABIE Awards recognize female leaders in the categories of technical leadership, social impact, innovative teaching practices, emerging leadership and international change agent.   The winners are nominated by their peers and chosen by a panel of fellow technologists and past ABIE Award winners based on their extraordinary achievements and commitment to excellence. This year’s GHC ABIE Awards and their winners, respectively, are: Technical Leadership ABIE Award  The Technical Leadership ABIE Award recognizes women technologists who demonstrate leadership through their contributions […]

Currently, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is hosting a three-day forum:  Wait, What? A Future Technology Forum, focusing on new technologies and how they can change the future, in particular with respect to national security. Three early-career engineers and scientists, chosen from a pool of 54 candidates, were selected to share their ideas to the Forum Participants.  They are: Alexander Bataller, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California Los Angeles …who studies dense microplasmas, a recently discovered form of matter… Anupama Lakshmanan, a graduate student in biology and biological engineering at the California Institute of Technology…focuses on adapting immune cells to provide non-invasive diagnosis, continuous monitoring and real-time treatment of […]

The 24-minute scientific documentary that was released this summer about the dynamics of the sun may soon be coming to a planetarium near you. “Solar Superstorms” is a new documentary that features data-driven visualizations that have been computed on the giant new supercomputing initiative, Blue Waters, based at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The documentary deputed on June 30th, 2015 at the Louisiana Art and Science Museum in Baton Rouge and has since then been appearing in over a dozen planetariums around the world. “Solar Superstorms” is part of project CADENS (Centrality of Digitally Enabled Science). CADENS is a National Science Foundation […]