Yesterday, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy’s National Artificial Intelligence (AI) Initiative Office launched the new AI.gov website.  This website is the home of the National AI Initiative Act of 2020 and as stated in the press release “the connection point to ongoing activities to advance U.S. leadership in AI from policy documents and strategies, to applications of AI, to the latest news and updates from the agencies and federal advisory boards helping shape the activities of the National AI Initiative.”  National AI Initiative Act of 2020 became law on January 1, 2021, providing for a coordinated program across the entire Federal government to accelerate AI research […]

Biresh Kumar Joardar began his CIFellowship in September 2020 after receiving his PhD from Washington State University in Summer of 2020. Joardar is at Duke University working with Krishnendu Chakrabarty, Distinguished Professor and Chair in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.  Current Project The theme of my current project is “Machine Learning for Machine Learning”. The project aims to demonstrate the symbiotic relationship between machine learning (ML) algorithms and computer system design. In this new paradigm, hardware researchers benefit from new data-driven ML algorithms and ML researchers benefit from efficient computing enabled by new hardware-software co-design. More specifically, I work on designing heterogeneous manycore and in-memory computing architectures with […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is pleased to announce the release of a new white paper,  A National Discovery Cloud: Preparing the US for Global Competitiveness in the New Era of 21st Century Digital Transformation, led by Ian Foster with significant support from Daniel Lopresti, Bill Gropp, Mark D. Hill, and Katie Schuman. The three “pillars,” as the paper calls them, of this new computation fabric include the “emergence of public cloud utilities as a new computing platform; the ability to extract information from enormous quantities of data via machine learning; and the emergence of computational simulation as a research method on par with experimental science.”  In order for the […]

Melanie Mitchell, Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council member and Professor at the Santa Fe Institute and Portland State University, was recently on the Munk Debates podcast, in an episode titled “The Rise of Thinking Machines” with Stuart Russell, Professor of Computer Science at the University of California at Berkeley. The podcast, led by Munk Debate chair and moderator Rudyard Griffiths, explores whether the quest for true AI is one of the great existential risks of our time.  Russell believes that if we keep on our current path, AI has the potential to cause real harm. He said, “We need to build a new foundation for AI, but we don’t know […]

Last week the Computing Research Association (CRA) and Computing Community Consortium (CCC) announced the Computing Innovation Fellows (CIFellows) Program for 2021. This program recognizes the significant disruption to the academic job search caused by the pandemic and associated economic uncertainty and aims to help ensure continuity of the research pipeline through disruptions related to COVID-19.  Awards will support an individual for 2 years as a postdoctoral fellow (“CIFellow”) at a host institution of their choosing. CRA will issue subawards to the Host Institution to cover an annual postdoc salary of $75,000, plus fringe and indirect costs (capped at 35%). CIFellows will have the ability to select a Fall 2021 or […]

In October 2020, the Computing Research Association (CRA) and the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) released more than a dozen white papers exploring areas and issues around computing research with the potential to address national priorities over the next four years. Called “Quadrennial Papers,” the white papers attempt to portray a broad picture of computing research detailing potential research directions, challenges, and recommendations for policymakers and the computing research community. As a continuation of our 2020 series, we are delighted to release two more papers titled: “Taking Stock of the Present and Future of Smart Technologies for Older Adults and Caregivers” and “Imagine All the People: Citizen Science, Artificial Intelligence, and […]