Nadya Bliss, Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Executive Council member and Executive Director of the Global Security Initiative (GSI), was recently interviewed by her local CBS affiliate station on tracking how misinformation and disinformation spreads on social media and why, in recent years, it is spreading more rapidly.  “Around events that are changing really rapidly, the information ecosystem is particularly sensitive to all kinds of noise. Whether it’s misinformation without intent or disinformation with intent,” Bliss said. “It’s very difficult for an individual to be able to parse everything and we’re very susceptible. We’re in this moment where we are consistently checking, which makes us more vulnerable. False information tends to spread […]

The National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) subcommittee on Artificial Intelligence (AI) just released a new report that provides Recommendations for Leveraging Cloud Computing Resources for Federally Funded Artificial Intelligence Research and Development. The report provides recommendations on better enabling the use of cloud computing resources for federally funded AI Research and Development (R&D). See a summary of those recommendations below.  Recommendation 1: Launch and support pilot projects to identify and explore the advantages and challenges associated with the use of commercial clouds in conducting federally funded AI research. Recommendation 2: Improve education and training opportunities to help researchers better leverage cloud resources for AI R&D. Recommendation 3: Catalog best […]

The National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) subcommittee on Future Advanced Computing Ecosystems just released a new report on Pioneering The Future Advanced Computing Ecosystem. It lays out a strategic plan that envisions a future in which an “advanced computing ecosystem provides the foundation for continuing American leadership in science and engineering, economic competitiveness, and national security.” The plan outlines the following strategic objectives:  Utilize the future advanced computing ecosystem as a strategic resource spanning government, academia, nonprofits, and industry.  Establish an innovative, trusted, verified, usable, and sustainable software and data ecosystem.  Support foundational, applied, and translational research and development to drive the future of advanced computing and its applications.  […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) recently sponsored a Blue Sky Ideas Conference Track at the 28th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems (ACM SIGSPATIAL 2020), November 3-6th, 2020, online.  The emphasis of this track was on visionary ideas, long term challenges, and opportunities in research that are outside of the current mainstream topics of the field. First Place-Smartmedia: Locally & Contextually-Adapted Streaming Media Yaron Kanza (AT&T Labs-Research), David Gibbon (AT&T Labs-Research), Divesh Srivastava (AT&T Labs-Research), Valerie Yip (AT&T Labs-Research), Eric Zavesky (AT&T Labs-Research) Second Place-Leveraging geospatial data gateways to support the operational application of deep learning models (Vision Paper) Aiman Soliman (National Center for Supercomputing Applications, University of Illinois), Jeffrey Terstriep […]

The following was adapted from this Santa Fe blog post.  At a recent presentation at the Science Writers 2020 conference, Joshua Garland and Mirta Galesic of the Santa Fe Institute presented the first large-scale analysis of tens of millions of instances of hate and counter-hate speech on Twitter. Their findings suggest that organized movements to counteract hate speech on social media are more effective than striking out on one’s own. “I’ve seen this big shift in civil discourse in the last two or three years towards being much more hateful and much more polarized,” says Garland, a mathematician and Applied Complexity Fellow at SFI. “So, for me, an interesting question […]

Recently, the Computing Research Association’s Computing Community Consortium (CCC) released a white paper called Pandemic Informatics: Preparation, Robustness, and Resilience, by Elizabeth Bradley (University of Colorado Boulder), Madhav Marathe (University of Virginia), Melanie Moses (The University of New Mexico), William D Gropp (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign), and Daniel Lopresti (Lehigh University). It is part of the series of white papers called Quadrennial Papers that explore areas and issues around computing research with potential to address national priorities.  The Pandemic Informatics paper outlines an effective strategy to reduce the national and global burden of pandemics. It includes (i) detect timing and location of occurrence, taking into account the many interdependent driving […]