The National Science Foundation (NSF) will hold a webinar for their proposal solicitation “Safe-Learning Enabled Systems” on April 5th, 2023, 1:00-2:00 PM Eastern Time. Webinar Synopsis: As artificial intelligence (AI) systems rapidly increase in size, acquire new capabilities, and are deployed in high-stakes settings, their safety becomes extremely important. Ensuring system safety requires more than improving accuracy, efficiency, and scalability: it requires ensuring that systems are robust to extreme events, and monitoring them for anomalous and unsafe behavior.   The objective of the Safe Learning-Enabled Systems program, which is a partnership between the National Science Foundation, Open Philanthropy and Good Ventures, is to foster foundational research that leads to the […]

This week, the National Science Foundation (NSF), along with five other U.S. government agencies, launched the Building the Prototype Open Knowledge Network (Proto-OKN). This $20 million initiative, will provide funding opportunities towards building a prototype version of an integrated data and knowledge infrastructure called an open knowledge network. An open knowledge network (OKN) is a publicly accessible, interconnected set of data repositories and associated knowledge graphs that will enable data-driven, artificial intelligence-based solutions for a broad set of societal challenges. In 2018, the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) partnered with the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) to  bring together the community and produce a 20-Year Roadmap for Artificial Intelligence. The report emphasized […]

Last week the National Science Foundation celebrated the one year anniversary of their Directorate for Technology, Innovations and Partnerships (TIP). TIP was created to harness the nation’s vast and diverse talent pool to accelerate critical and emerging technologies and address pressing societal and economic challenges. TIP comprises three primary focus areas – fostering innovation and technology ecosystems, establishing translation pathways, and partnering across sectors to improve U.S. competitiveness, grow the U.S. economy and engage and train a diverse workforce for future, high-wage jobs. The following is a letter from Erwin Gianchandani (Assistant Director for TIP) and Gracie Narcho (Deputy Assistant Director for TIP) on TIP’s accomplishments over the last year. […]

This post was originally published by Helen Wright in the CRA-Industry Blog. On February 22-23, 2023 in Washington, DC, the Computing Research Association (CRA) held the Accessible Technology for All Workshop. The workshop was attended by over 40 participants from academia, industry, and government and 20 remote participants. The purpose of this workshop was to frame the state of the art of accessible technology, identify forces shaping the evolution of accessible technology, and develop an understanding of implications for the next wave of computer science research in accessibility. By the end of the workshop, important areas of future research were identified and the need for tech-informed policy were highlighted by the participants. A workshop report will […]

CIFellows Mentor, Michael Carbin is holding a lecture on “Programming Uncertain Computations” as a part of the NSF CISE Distinguished Lecture Series. The lecture will take place online on March 23 from 11am-12:30pm ET. Carbin was a 2020 CIFellows Mentor to Yi Ding at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Talk Abstract: Computer systems must increasingly operate in the presence of uncertainty in their execution environment in that new applications and hardware platforms require our software systems to model and compute with objects that are inherently uncertain in that their behaviors are only given by noisy measurements. This reality presents many new questions about how to interpret, debug, validate, verify, and optimize these […]

The following is a joint Dear Colleague Letter from three Assistant Directors at the National Science Foundation – Margaret Martonosi (CISE), James L. Moore III (STEM Education (EDU)), Susan S. Margulies (Engineering (ENG)) Sean L. Jones (Mathematical & Physical Sciences (MPS)), and Sylvia Butterfield (Social, Behavioral, & Economic Sciences (SBE)). The letter calls for input from the community on possible topics and future directions for cybersecurity and privacy research. You can read the original on the NSF website here. March 1, 2023 Dear Colleagues: OVERVIEW For over a decade, the National Science Foundation’s Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace (SaTC) program has been NSF’s flagship cybersecurity and privacy research program, supporting approximately $1 […]