The MacArthur Foundation recently announced its 2022 MacArthur Fellows – 25 individuals whose achievements show “new modes of activism, artistic practice, and citizen science. They are excavators uncovering what has been overlooked, undervalued, or poorly understood. They are archivists reminding us of what should survive.” The MacArthur Fellows program grants each recipient a no-strings attached stipend of $800,000 in order to support his or her own creative and professional ambitions. The program features scientists, artists, historians, and writers. Among the new Fellows is Computer scientist Yejin Choi. Dr. Choi is currently the Brett Helsel Professor in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington at Seattle, […]

This Wednesday, Oct 12, from 3:10pmET-4:30pmET, Barbara Grosz is giving a Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society (SRI) Seminar Series talk. Her talk is titled “Fostering responsible computing research,” and will be followed by interactive discussions in virtual breakout rooms. Grosz is the lead researcher on a recently conducted National Academies’ Computer Science and Telecommunications Board (CSTB) study on the ethical and societal impacts of computer science, and she will be presenting the major findings in the pre-publication report. CCC posted a blog earlier this summer on the CSTB report. In her talk, Grosz will outline tangible steps research institutions can take in order to be more considerate of […]

The National Science Foundation (NSF) recently released a joint Dear Colleague Letter (DCL) announcing the launch of the Advanced Cyberinfrastructure Coordination Ecosystem of Services and Support (ACCESS) program. The program will provide services that ensure the continued access and availability of the cyberinfrastructure (CI) ecosystem for the science and engineering research and education communities. This has the potential to grant communities access to resources such as cloud-data infrastructure, testbeds and high performance computing systems, connect supporting researchers with similar research goals, and predict the CI ecosytem’s needs. The following is a joint Dear Colleague Letter from Margaret Martonosi (Assistant Director of the Computer and Information Science and Engineering directorate) and Manish […]

The National Science Foundation announced a series of grants as a part of their new Predictive Intelligence for Pandemic Prevention (PIPP) program. The quick onset, mass devastation, and unpredictability of new strands and waves of contagion with COVID-19 taught us just how unprepared we were to face a global pandemic. Nearly $26 million in new awards will be used to support “high-risk, high-payoff convergent research that aims to identify, model, predict, track and mitigate the effects of future pandemics.” The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) wrote a series of white papers revolving around pandemic informatics. Published in November 2020, the first paper, Pandemic Informatics: Preparation, Robustness, and Resilience was part of […]

In 2021, the Coordinated Science Laboratory (CSL) celebrated their 70th anniversary with two big events: the Future of Computing Symposium (October 2021) and the AI and Social Responsibility Symposium (March 2022). The CSL is an Interdisciplinary Research Unit (IRU) in The Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) with a rich history of scientific and engineering advances. It brings together researchers from computing, communication, control, circuits, and beyond. CSL’s research covers the full computing stack, from circuits and high-performance applications to signal processing, machine learning, security and trust, and computing’s impact on society and the resulting need for social responsibility. The CSL recently released a white […]

Pending funding, the National Institute of Health (NIH) plans to launch the Bridge to Artificial Intelligence (Bridge2AI) program. Collaboratively managed by the NIH Common Fund, the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health, the National Eye Institute, the National Human Genome Research Institute, the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering, and the National Library of Medicine, the program seeks to provide comprehensive, high-quality and ethically sourced datasets to catalyze the widespread use of AI in the biomedical and behavioral research communities. AI has the ability to transform the biomedical and behavioral science fields. Possible applications include informing clinical decision making, monitoring and predicting health needs in real time and […]