In anticipation of the Sochi 2014 Olympic Winter games, the National Science Foundation (NSF) has partnered with NBC Learn to feature the “Science and Engineering of the 2014 Olympic Winter Games.” The series highlights the physics, engineering, chemistry, design and mathematics behind the olympics. One of the segments titled, “Olympic movement and robotic design,” features Raffaello D’Andrea, Professor of Dynamic Systems and Control at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Switzerland. The segment highlights the Quadrocopter, which is similar to a helicopter, except with four independent rotors that allow it to move with more agility. The video shows the Quadrocopter working through a slalom course and also shows the […]

This year the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is sponsoring a Blue Sky Ideas Track at AAMAS, the Thirteenth International Conference on Autonomous Agents and MutliAgent Systems. AAMAS is the largest and most prestigious international conference in its area, which covers all aspects of research in the areas of agents and multiagent systems, ranging from theoretical aspects to innovative applications. AAMAS typically draws around 650 attendees, with a truly international participation of researchers from the USA and Canada, multiple countries in Europe, Australia, Japan and other countries in Asia, and South America. The goal of this track is to generate out-of-the-box thinking and encourage researchers to present visionary concepts that can lead to future […]

Today, in conjunction with the Robotics VO, National Science Foundation (NSF), and The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), the Community Community Consortium (CCC) is releasing a report on the Opportunities in Robotics, Automation, and Computer Science. The report is a result of an October 2013 workshop at the White House Conference Center in Washington, D.C. The workshop brought together 28 participants from industry, academia, and government to discuss opportunities in advanced manufacturing for robotics, automation, and computer science. The goal of the workshop was to frame a set of concrete problems that could be used to guide academic basic and applied research that would support advances in manufacturing, […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is releasing its third segment in the Computing Research in Action Series.   This segment features the Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp) research lab, led by Professor Shwetak Patel, at the University of Washington. The UbiComp lab, which consists of an interdisciplinary team of students (CS, EE, CE, ME), focuses on solving interesting and socially meaningful problems using a mix of hardware and software applications. The UbiComp lab focuses on four areas of ubiquitous computing: Novel interaction techniques: With the growing number of computers around us embedded into the environment, there is a need to interact with these computers beyond the traditional keyboard and mouse. Sustainability  sensing: Using computer science, machine learning and signal processing […]

The following entry is a special contribution to this blog from Douglas H. Fisher, Associate Professor of Computer Science at Vanderbilt University. This year Doug and Carla Gomes (Cornell University) were co-chairs of the Computational Sustainability and Artificial Intelligence (AI) track at the Twenty-Seventh Conference on Artificial Intelligence on July 14-18, 2013 in Bellevue, Washington. In this entry, Doug highlights the best paper awards for this track, sponsored by the Computing Community Consortium. The Twenty-Seventh AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-13) convened last month in Bellevue, Washington. For the third consecutive year there was a special track on Computational Sustainability, a nascent and growing field of computing that is concerned […]

The following is a special contribution to this blog from Douglas H. Fisher, Director of the Vanderbilt Institute for Digital Learning, and Associate Professor of Computer Science and Computer Engineering at Vanderbilt University and Armando Fox, Professor in Residence of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at University of California, Berkeley. In February 2013, Doug and Armando co-chaired the Workshop on Multidisciplinary Research for Online Education (MROE). In this blog entry, they revisit that CCC-sponsored visioning activity, and also spotlight the upcoming ACM Conference on Learning at Scale, which is being co-organized by Armando. New venues for reporting scholarship on “learning at scale”, to include massive open online courses (MOOCs), are […]