In December 2010 and then again in December 2012, the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) conducted an extensive review of the Federal Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) Program – the $4B coordinated multi-agency IT R&D program. PCAST has just released a 2015 follow-up report on the progress of the NITRD program, which was conducted by co-chairs of the PCAST NITRD Working Group Susan Graham (PCAST Member and UC Berkeley) and Greg Hager (Johns Hopkins University and the Computing Community Consortium Chair). Other PCAST NITRD Working Group Members included, William J. Dally (Stanford University), Eric Horvitz (Microsoft Research), Sara Kiesler (Carnegie-Mellon University), Michael McQuade (United Technologies […]

Google announced the finalists for its annual international science fair. There are projects from all over the world covering a wide variety of fields, including computer science.  All the projects are by scientists under 18 years old. The projects will be exhibited and judged at an event on September 21 at the Google Headquarters. You can browse through all 20 finalists at the Google Science Fair website, but here are two that stood out. ALAIR (Assisted Living Autonomous Internet Robot) by Benjamin Lourdes Hylak from Oxford, Pennsylvania. Benjamin, age 17, built an assisted living robot for $1,250 that can preform the duties of an in-home nurse, such as: Healthcare/homecare monitoring Pill […]

In May, The White House Office of Science Technology Policy, Department of Commerce and the Arnold Foundation approached the Computing Community Consortium (CCC), as a community organization of computer science researchers, to lead a conversation for law enforcement to learn about the state of the art in video analysis techniques and how they may be applicable to analyze and improve law enforcement practice. This was a timely opportunity to provide input to a burgeoning application space: police body worn cameras. The CCC brought together a panel of computer vision experts and law enforcement personnel. Their subsequent discussions resulted in the recently released Video Analysis for Body-worn Cameras in Law Enforcement whitepaper. The whitepaper […]

The following Great Innovative Idea is from Michela Milano at the University of Bologna-Italy and Pascal Van Hentenryck from NICTA Optimisation Research Group and the University of Michigan. Their Emerging Architectures for Global System Science paper was one of the winners at the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) sponsored Blue Sky Ideas Conference Track at the 29th Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-15), January 25-30, 2015 in Austin, Texas. The Innovative Idea Our society is organized around a number of (interdependent) global systems: Logistic and supply chains, health services, energy networks, financial markets, computer networks, and cities. Typically, people optimize these systems by considering sub-systems in isolation and ignoring aspects that cannot be modelled easily such […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) sponsored a Blue Sky Ideas Track Competition at the AAAI-RSS Special Workshop on the 50th Anniversary of Shakey: The Role of AI to Harmonize Robots and Humans in Rome, Italy. It was a half day workshop on July 16th during the Robotics Science and Systems (RSS) 2015 Conference. This workshop joined a series of events organized by Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) and the IEEE Robotics & Automation Society to mark the anniversary of Shakey, the first mobile intelligent robot able to reason about its own actions. One of the invited speakers Peter Hart, who was one of the original Shakey team members, presented at the workshop on Making […]

President Obama has issued an Executive Order establishing the National Strategic Computing Initiative (NSCI), which is an effort to create a cohesive, multi-agency strategic vision, and Federal investment strategy in high-performance computing (HPC). HPC systems, through their high levels of computing power and large amounts of storage capacity, are essential to economic competitiveness, scientific discovery, and national security. The NSCI will ensure that the United States continues leading in this field over the coming decades. As the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology has concluded, high-performance computing “must now assume a broader meaning, encompassing not only flops, but also the ability, for example, to efficiently manipulate vast and rapidly increasing […]