The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters recently announced the award of the 2021 Abel Prize going to matematician László Lovász (Alfréd Rényi Institute of Mathematics and Eötvös Loránd University) and computer scientist Avi Wigderson (Princeton University) “for their foundational contributions to theoretical computer science and discrete mathematics, and their leading role in shaping them into central fields of modern mathematics.”   Starting in 2003, the Abel Prize is a distinguished award given to members of the scientific community to recognize outstanding work and contributions to the field of mathematics. Nominations are reviewed by the ‘Abel Committee’ consisting of five mathematicians to determine a winner. Lovász and Wigderson’s award-winning work […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is excited to announce the new website feature, “CIFellows Spotlight”, which will highlight the work of the Computing Innovation Fellows (CIFellows) going forward. Announced in May 2020, the CIFellows program was created, with strong support from NSF,  to provide recent PhD graduates in computing research with the opportunity to continue their work despite the hiring disruptions in academic institutions due to COVID-19. These articles will give the CIFellows the opportunity to share their work with the community and dive deeper into the details of their current project(s). Yi Ding began her CIFellowship in January 2021 after receiving her PhD from University of Chicago this past […]

The following Great Innovative Idea is from Yaron Kanza (AT&T Labs-Research), David Gibbon (AT&T Labs-Research), Divesh Srivastava (AT&T Labs-Research), Valerie Yip (AT&T Labs-Research), and Eric Zavesky (AT&T Labs-Research). The team’s paper, Smartmedia: Locally & Contextually-Adapted Streaming Media, won first-place in the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) sponsored Blue Sky Ideas Track Competition at the 28th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems.  The Idea Streaming media is gaining popularity, with numerous new services for video on demand and live broadcast. Often, streaming media is consumed on mobile devices, like smartphones and tablets, in different locations and contexts. In the novel approach we present, named Smartmedia, the streamed content […]

Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council Member, Professor of Computer Science at the University of New Mexico and External Faculty Member at the Santa Fe Institute, Melanie E. Moses, recently published an article in Nautilus titled, “How to Fix the Vaccine Rollout: A computational biologist charts a fair and efficient course for vaccine distribution.” A year after the onset of COVID-19, the development and approval of vaccines provides hope that the pandemic nightmare is nearing an end. With countries facing second or third waves and, in many places, cases hitting an all time high, vaccinating our most vulnerable populations as quickly as possible is essential. Unfortunately, until now, the vaccine rollout […]

The following Great Innovative Idea is from Daniel Larremore, Assistant Professor at University of Colorado Boulder Computer Science Department and the BioFrontier Institute, where he leads Larremore Lab. In addition, he holds affiliations with the Department of Applied Mathematics and with the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. His recent work with COVID-19 has captured the attention of large media sources such as Medscape, the Washington Examiner and the New York Times. The Idea How does the progression of a typical SARS-CoV-2 infection affect the way we should think about COVID-19 policies, like testing and vaccine prioritization? When doing mathematical and computational […]

Melanie Mitchell, Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council member and Professor at the  Santa Fe Institute and Portland State University was recently interviewed on the Medscape podcast, Medicine and the Machine in an episode titled ‘Can AI Exist in Medicine Without Human Oversight?. The podcast, led by Medscape editor-in-chief Eric Topol and Abraham Verghese from Stanford, explores critical questions and discussions on artificial intelligence’s (AI) impact on modern medicine. While it was acknowledged that AI has made great strides in the past decade on accomplishing narrow tasks, the episode highlights that the technology still lacks the ability to work autonomously in the field of medicine. Making this a possibility would require […]