The National Science Foundation (NSF) is currently accepting proposals for their National Artificial Intelligence (AI) Research Institutes program. By offering funding for AI Research Institutes the program seeks to strengthen the national AI research network and drive advancements in multi-disciplinary, multi-stakeholder research on large-scale, long-term research frontiers in AI.  Institutions of higher education (including community colleges) and non-profit, non-academic organizations are eligible to apply. Further details on eligibility and proposal requirements can be found on the NSF website. This round of institute proposals MUST focus on one of these high-priority themes:  Intelligent Agents for Next-Generation Cybersecurity  Neural and Cognitive Foundations of Artificial Intelligence  AI for Climate-Smart Agriculture and Forestry AI […]

A somewhat surprising theme emerged during the “Scientific Vocation Revisited – Can Future Discoveries be Made by Artificial Intelligence?” session at the 8th Heidelberg Laureate Forum (HLF). The session featured panelists Jeffrey A. Dean (Google Research), Harry Collins (Cardiff University) and Dafna Shahaf (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem); and, while they did discuss the potential impact of AI systems on the process of scientific discovery, they also kept reiterating the importance of human collaboration to making scientific advancements; particularly collaborations that occurs face-to-face. To open the session, moderator Volker Stollorz (Science Media Center Germany) asked Jeffrey Dean why private industry, such as Google and OpenAI, has been able to make […]

Khari Douglas will be covering the 8th Heidelberg Laureate Forum (HLF) on the CCC blog all week. Stay tuned and check out the HLF blog for more coverage of the event.  On the final day of the 2021 Heidelberg Laureate Forum a panel of laureates convened to discuss “Advances in Computer Science, Mathematics and Computing.” The panel included Vint Cerf (2004 Turing Award), Yoshua Bengio (2018 Turing Award), Alessio Figalli (2018 Fields Medal), Yann LeCun (2018 Turing Award), and Avi Wigderson (1994 Nevanlinna Prize and 2021 Abel Prize). The panel covered a lot of topics including the future of AI and advice for students pursuing their PhD’s. Among the highlights, Vint Cerf asked the panel if they are worried about AI and […]

The Climate Change AI (CCAI) organization, which is composed of volunteers from academia and industry who believe that tackling climate change requires concerted societal action in machine learning, has announced a new Call for Proposals: Climate Change AI Innovation Grants.  Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) can help support climate change mitigation and adaptation, as well as climate science, across many different areas, for example energy, agriculture, forestry, climate modeling, and disaster response (for a broader overview of the space, please refer to Climate Change AI’s interactive topic summaries and materials from previous events). However, impactful research and deployment have often been held back by a lack of data […]

Melanie Mitchell, Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council member and Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, was recently featured in a Scientific American article, ‘The Computer Scientist Training AI to Think with Analogies’. The article focused on explaining the importance of getting Artificial Intelligence (AI) to recognize and use analogies and included an interview on the topic from Quanta.  If and how AI can reach the same level of intelligence and independence as humans is an interdisciplinary problem that has plagued the field for many decades. Mitchell believes the key to success is getting these machines to think with analogies. The greatest advances in AI have focused on training to succeed […]

The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the National Science Foundation released a Request For Information (RFI) to gather public input on the National AI Research Resource (NAIRR) implementation plan. This is following the announcement last month about the launch of the Task Force, which is mandated by Congress to study the feasibility of and develop a roadmap to implement a National AI Research Resource. This RFI seeks input from a broad array of stakeholders on the topics set forth below. Comments from the public will be used to inform the Task Force’s consideration of options and the development of an implementation roadmap. Responders are invited to provide […]