Over the last twenty years, the proliferation of Internet access, coupled with the explosion of online social networks, has allowed people around the world to share their ideas and experiences with the click of a button. Beauty vloggers craft YouTube tutorials, gamers stream their performances live over Twitch, and journalists share and source news from across the world through Twitter. This web of content is always expanding—much of the information within it is true, however, plenty of it is not. How can we determine fact from fiction in this rapidly shifting information landscape? In response to these emerging concerns the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) organized the Detecting, Combating, and Identifying […]

The last decade has seen the increased use of machine learning and data science to make decisions—from figuring out which YouTube video to recommend to deciding whom to give a loan, automated decisions are now everywhere. However, as deployment of these decision-making systems has increased so too have concerns about the transparency of the component algorithms and the fairness of their outcomes. This topic was the subject of the New Approaches to Fairness in Automated Decision Making scientific session at the 2020 American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Annual meeting in Seattle, Washington one month ago. The session was moderated by Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Director Ann Schwartz Drobnis and included: Sampath […]

A new episode of the Computing Community Consortium‘s (CCC) podcast, Catalyzing Computing, is now available. This is part two of Khari Douglas’ interview with Natesh Ganesh, a recent PhD graduate from the University of Massachussetts at Amherst and a current Research Fellow at the University of Colorado, Boulder through the NIST Professional Research Experience Program (PREP). Natesh’s research interest lie in the fields of AI, neuromorphic hardware, thermodynamics (Natesh was an organizer of the CCC’s 2019 Thermodynamic Computing workshop, read the Thermodynamic Computing workshop report here), and the emergence of consciousness. In this episode we talk about some of the key contributors to the space of artificial consciousness and discuss the ethics […]

A new episode of the Computing Community Consortium‘s (CCC) podcast, Catalyzing Computing, is now available. Khari Douglas interviews Natesh Ganesh, a recent PhD graduate from the University of Massachussetts at Amherst and a current Research Fellow at the University of Colorado, Boulder through the NIST Professional Research Experience Program (PREP), whose research interest lie in the fields of AI, neuromorphic hardware, thermodynamics, and the emergence of consciousness. In this episode we discuss some, though certainly not all, of the leading theoretical frameworks for studying artificial consciousness. You can stream the episode in the embedded player below or find it on Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Google Play | Blubrry | iHeartRadio | Youtube.   If you are interested in appearing in an episode […]

On any given day, tens of millions of people find themselves trapped in instances of modern slavery. The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is organizing a visioning workshop, in collaboration with Code 8.7, on March 3-4th, 2020 in Washington, DC that will bring together members of the computing research community along with anti-slavery practitioners and survivors to lay out a research roadmap aimed at applying AI to the fight against human trafficking. Building on the kickoff Code 8.7 conference held at the UN in February 2019, the focus for this event will be to link the ambitious goals outlined in the 20-Year Community Roadmap for AI Research to challenges vital in […]

The following is a recent press release from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. They proposed 10 principles to guide federal regulation of AI technologies and applications.  These draft principles will soon be open for public comment for 60 days (with a notice posted to the Federal Register). THE WHITE HOUSE Office of Science and Technology Policy FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE January 7, 2020 White House Proposes U.S. AI Regulatory Principles Today, the White House is proposing U.S. AI regulatory principles to govern the development and use of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies in the private sector. Through these 10 principles, developed as part of the American AI Initiative launched by President Trump, […]