The National Science Foundation announced a series of grants as a part of their new Predictive Intelligence for Pandemic Prevention (PIPP) program. The quick onset, mass devastation, and unpredictability of new strands and waves of contagion with COVID-19 taught us just how unprepared we were to face a global pandemic. Nearly $26 million in new awards will be used to support “high-risk, high-payoff convergent research that aims to identify, model, predict, track and mitigate the effects of future pandemics.” The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) wrote a series of white papers revolving around pandemic informatics. Published in November 2020, the first paper, Pandemic Informatics: Preparation, Robustness, and Resilience was part of […]

In 2021, the Coordinated Science Laboratory (CSL) celebrated their 70th anniversary with two big events: the Future of Computing Symposium (October 2021) and the AI and Social Responsibility Symposium (March 2022). The CSL is an Interdisciplinary Research Unit (IRU) in The Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) with a rich history of scientific and engineering advances. It brings together researchers from computing, communication, control, circuits, and beyond. CSL’s research covers the full computing stack, from circuits and high-performance applications to signal processing, machine learning, security and trust, and computing’s impact on society and the resulting need for social responsibility. The CSL recently released a white […]

Transformative advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and technology require large amounts of accurate, comprehensive data. There is a widening disparity between the types and amounts of datasets that organizations have access to. This not only hinders research, but widens the knowledge gap between entities. A commonly talked about solution is developing an open source knowledge structure that will be available to everyone and house a wide diversity of data to help address pressing issues such as economic growth, climate change, misinformation, pandemic prevention etc. Last week the National Science Foundation (NSF) released an “Open Knowledge Network Roadmap Report” as a guide towards realizing this type of infrastructure. In February through […]

Pending funding, the National Institute of Health (NIH) plans to launch the Bridge to Artificial Intelligence (Bridge2AI) program. Collaboratively managed by the NIH Common Fund, the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health, the National Eye Institute, the National Human Genome Research Institute, the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering, and the National Library of Medicine, the program seeks to provide comprehensive, high-quality and ethically sourced datasets to catalyze the widespread use of AI in the biomedical and behavioral research communities. AI has the ability to transform the biomedical and behavioral science fields. Possible applications include informing clinical decision making, monitoring and predicting health needs in real time and […]

Ian Foster, former Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council Member and Professor at the University of Chicago and Division Director at Argonne National Laboratory, was just named the 2022 Ken Kennedy award recipient. Presented by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Computer Society (IEEE-CS) the Ken Kennedy Award is an annual honor recognizing contributions to programmability and productivity in computing and community service or mentoring contributions. You can see past award winners here. Foster is recognized for his substantial contributions in accelerating scientific discovery in computational science by establishing innovative, newfangled applications of distributed computing both within supercomputers and over networks. His work […]

The National Science Foundation’s (NSF) new Directorate for Technology, Innovation and Partnerships (TIP) is holding an introductory webinar September 27th from 2-3PM ET. The TIP directorate seeks to catalyze research and create breakthrough technologies by fostering a healthy, lucrative ecosystem of high-wage, high-impact STEM jobs. Through a number of programs and investments, TIP works towards accelerating the transition from research to impact and establishing smooth transitions of technological products from the lab to the market. You can learn more about TIP’s programs, objectives and funding opportunities by registering for the webinar here. You can get a brief overview from reading a recent CCC blog post recapping NSF TIP’s first quarterly […]