This is the second post in a two-part series recapping the panel Social Technologies: Why We Can’t Live With Them or Without Them, which was supported by the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) at the 2025 AAAS Annual Conference. The first post, Rethinking Social Technologies: Platforms, Protocols, and the Push for Decentralization, explored how researchers and technologists are approaching the future of social media through decentralized design and protocol-driven innovation. This follow-up highlights the second half of the panel discussion, which examined critical issues related to artificial intelligence, online trust, and potential regulatory responses. The panel was moderated by Sarita Schoenebeck, Professor of Information at the University of Michigan, and featured […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) supported a session at this year’s AAAS Annual Conference titled Social Technologies: Why We Can’t Live With Them Or Without Them. The panel was moderated by Sarita Schoenebeck, Professor of Information at the University of Michigan, and featured Andrés Monroy-Hernández, Associate Professor and co-leader of the Princeton HCI Lab at Princeton University, Motahhare Eslami, Assistant Professor of Software and Societal Systems at Carnegie Mellon University, and Bryan Newbold, Protocol Engineer at Bluesky. The panelists provided their perspectives on how social technologies are impacting society. Schoenebeck opened the panel by explaining that while there are many demonstrated benefits to social technologies (e.g., online conversations, relationships, and […]

CCC supported three scientific sessions at this year’s AAAS Annual Conference, and in case you weren’t able to attend in person, we are recapping each session. This week, we are summarizing the highlights of the session, “How Big Trends in Computing are Shaping Science.” In Part 5, we share the Q&A portion of the panel. The panel comprised Jayson Lynch (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Gabriel Manso (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), and Mehmet Belviranli (Colorado School of Mines), and was moderated by Neil Thompson (Massachusetts Institute of Technology).   Neil Thompson: “Gabriel, you highlighted just how dramatic the escalation in the amount of computing being used by these models is, and […]

CCC supported three scientific sessions at this year’s AAAS Annual Conference, and in case you weren’t able to attend in person, we are recapping each session. This week, we are summarizing the highlights of the session, “How Big Trends in Computing are Shaping Science.” In Part 4, we hear from Dr. Mehmet Belviranli, an Assistant Professor of computer science at Colorado School of Mines, in his presentation, titled, “Taming Diversely Heterogeneous Compute Systems.”   Dr. Mehmet Belviranli rounded out the panel by discussing heterogeneous compute systems, and their role in accelerating computing. “Heterogeneous computing”, said Belviranli, “is any kind of computing, in addition to CPUs, that relies on other architectures […]

CCC supported three scientific sessions at this year’s AAAS Annual Conference, and in case you weren’t able to attend in person, we are recapping each session. This week, we are summarizing the highlights of the session, “How Big Trends in Computing are Shaping Science.” In Part 3, we hear from Dr. Jayson Lynch, a Research Scientist in the FutureTech lab at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who explains the speed at which algorithms are improving.   Dr. Jayson Lynch began their presentation by addressing the cliffhanger that Manso ended on: how quickly are algorithms improving, and will these algorithms serve as partial solution to the growing need for compute? “The main […]

CCC supported three scientific sessions at this year’s AAAS Annual Conference, and in case you weren’t able to attend in person, we are recapping each session. This week, we are summarizing the highlights of the session, “How Big Trends in Computing are Shaping Science.” In Part 2, we hear from Gabriel Manso, a first year PhD student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who explains the computational limits of deep learning.   Gabriel Manso, a first-year PhD student at MIT and a member of the MIT FutureTech research group, discussed the computational limits of deep learning along with insights from his research. Deep learning is pervasive across most areas of science […]