The following Great Innovative Idea is from Philip Cohen, Professor (adj) of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence at Monash University (Melbourne, Australia) and President of Multimodal Interfaces, LLC. Cohen was one of the winners from the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) sponsored Blue Sky Ideas Track Competition at the AAAI-20. His winning paper is called Back to the Future for Dialogue Research. Problem Current so-called “conversational assistants”  provide minimal assistance and therefore are of limited utility.  If they are successful in engaging in a dialogue, current systems typically will only perform the transactions that have explicitly been requested of them. But in our everyday human interactions, we expect people not only to infer what we literally say that we want, but […]

Join the AAAS Science & Technology Policy Fellows for a virtual symposium on Living with AI: The Human Impacts of AI on June 11 from 9:00 AM ET- 4:30 PM ET. Please register here! Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly changing how we think about every aspect of our daily lives, impacting our food, health, work, and society. Public discourse often focuses on AI as‌ ‌a‌ ‌social‌ ‌good‌ ‌that‌ ‌will‌ ‌increase‌ ‌efficiency‌ ‌and‌ ‌improve‌ ‌outcomes for all,‌ without examining how racial, ethnic, and gender biases can be encoded‌ ‌into‌ the underlying ‌algorithms.‌ Building on the recommendations of the National AI R&D Strategic Plan, this symposium will provide a nuanced perspective on […]

Applications are now open for the Computing Research Association (CRA) and Computing Community Consortium’s (CCC) Computing Innovation Fellows (CIFellows) Program for 2020. This program recognizes the significant disruption to the academic job search caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and associated economic uncertainty and aims to provide a career-enhancing bridge experience for recent and soon-to-be PhD graduates in computing. The goal of the CIFellows program is to create career growth opportunities that support maintaining the computing research pipeline. Computing research is defined as any area included under the National Science Foundation (NSF) Computing and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Directorate. This effort takes inspiration from CRA/CCC’s NSF-funded Computing Innovation Fellows Programs with cohorts starting 2009, 2010, and […]

ACM has announced the election of Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council member Elisa Bertino as Secretary/Treasurer for a two-year term from July 1, 2020, to June 30, 2020! Bertino is the Samuel D. Conte Professor of Computer Science at Purdue University. In addition, Computing Research Association Board member and Vice Chair Nancy M. Amato has been elected for a four-year Member-at-Large term. She will serve from July 1, 2020, to June 30, 2024. Congrats, Elisa and Nancy!

From a press release from the University of Rochester.   Recently, the National Academy of Medicine (NAM) announced the 2020 Emerging Leaders in Health and Medicine Scholars. One of the ten selected emerging leaders is Ehsan Hoque, an assistant professor of computer science, and affiliate faculty for the Goergen Institute for Data Science, at the University of Rochester. He leads the Rochester Human-Computer Interaction (ROC HCI) Lab.  “These individuals are early- to mid-career professionals from a wide range of health-related fields, from emergency medicine and health economics to biomedical engineering and research and public health policy. The scholars are an essential part of a major NAM initiative, the Emerging Leaders in […]

The following is a guest blog post from Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council member Katie Siek, Indiana University.  Automated, proximity-based contact tracing apps use Bluetooth to identify who is near them. In theory, this is a great solution that can be efficiently deployed widely (albeit with many privacy and protocol considerations addressed here), however the assumption is that people have access to mobile phones with Bluetooth and use technology similarly. We know that not everyone has access to smartphones. Pew notes that approximately 70% of Americans who make less than $30,000 a year own a smartphone. Similar stats are seen for Americans who live in rural areas and those with […]