The following blog is from Ann Schwartz Drobnis, CCC Director.  Every February brings an exciting event for scientists – the AAAS Annual Meeting. AAAS is the American Association for the Advancement of Science, whose mission is to “advance science, engineering, and innovation throughout the world for the benefit of all people.”  It is the world’s largest multidisciplinary scientific society and the publisher of the Science family of journals. This year’s Annual Meeting brought scientists, engineers, and press from around the world to Seattle, Washington for three days of scientific sessions, panels, press events, discussions, and plenary talks in many different disciplines of science. “Computer science touches almost every aspect of our society today so it […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is proud to be a part of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) 2020 Annual Meeting taking place February 12-16, 2020 in Seattle, Washington. This year the CCC is supporting five scientific sessions at the AAAS Annual Meeting in addition to two communications and outreach opportunities. Learn more about each of the sessions below. New Approaches to Fairness in Automated Decision Making Friday, February 14th 8:00 – 9:30 AM Synopsis: Critical decisions are increasingly being made by machine-learning algorithms based on massive data trails that people all leave behind. Such decisions affect issues from college admissions and bank loans, to sentencing and police deployment. Concerns have been raised […]

The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) just announced its 2019 Fellows! Fellows are elected each year by their peers serving on the Council of AAAS, the organization’s member-run governing body. The honor recognizes diverse accomplishments, including pioneering research, leadership within a given field, teaching and mentoring, fostering collaborations and advancing public understanding of science.  Among the 2019 Fellows is Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council Member Odest Chadwicke (Chad) Jenkins (University of Michigan), “for distinguished contributions to the field of robotics and artificial intelligence, particularly for robot learning from human demonstration, cloud robotics, and broadening participation in computing.” Chad joined the CCC this year and is a member […]

There’s less than two weeks left to apply for the 2020-2021 cohort of AAAS Leshner Leadership Fellows! This program convenes mid-career scientists who demonstrate leadership in their research careers and in promoting meaningful dialogue between science and society. Each year, 15 Leshner Fellows from disciplines at the nexus of important science-society issues convene for a week of public engagement and science communication training and public engagement plan development in Washington, DC, then continue their activities while at their home institutions during the fellowship year. The 2020-2021 cohort will be comprised of active researchers in the field of artificial intelligence, new and emerging technologies that seek to replicate, mimic or augment human […]

Am I safe sitting at home with my pacemaker? Am I safe shopping online? Am I safe when I am using my web-cam enabled computer? These are all real concerns brought up by audience members at the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) scientific session at the 2019 American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Annual Meeting in Washington, DC. This session called Cybersecurity: Transcending Physics, Technology, and Society was moderated by CCC Chair Mark D. Hill (University of Wisconsin-Madison). The speakers were Kevin Fu (University of Michigan), John Masters (Red Hat), and Zeynep Tufekci (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill). Kevin Fu started the session by asking the audience what happens if your […]

How can we feed the world’s population – projected to reach ten billion people by 2050 – in a sustainable way that preserves the health of individuals, communities, and the environment? How can computer science be utilized to improve food production, processing, and distribution? These were the main topics at the Computing Community Consortium’s (CCC) scientific session on Sustainably Feeding Ten Billion People that took place February 16th at the AAAS 2019 Annual Meeting. The panelists for this session were Diane Wang (SUNY Buffalo), Ranveer Chandra (Microsoft Research), and Abraham Stroock (Cornell), while Susan McCouch (Cornell) moderated the session. Diane Wang’s presentation on Coupling Nature and Nurture: Supercharging Predictions for […]