About a month ago, at the beginning of this pandemic, the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) blogged about Running a Virtual Conference and highlighted Blair MacIntyre, a professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Interactive Computing and IEEE VR conference co-chair, and Kyle Johnsen, an associate professor in the University of Georgia’s College of Engineering, when they transitioned the IEEE VR 2020 Conference to an all-virtual event. See that blog here. Since then, the research community has started to adjust to this new normal and transition to virtual conferences. This includes the ACM Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS 2020), which was also held online in March. […]

In March 2020, the National Science Foundation (NSF) announced the first ten recipients of the NSF Program on Fairness in Artificial Intelligence in Collaboration with Amazon (FAI).  From the solicitation: NSF and Amazon are partnering to jointly support computational research focused on fairness in AI, with the goal of contributing to trustworthy AI systems that are readily accepted and deployed to tackle grand challenges facing society. Specific topics of interest include, but are not limited to transparency, explainability, accountability, potential adverse biases and effects, mitigation strategies, algorithmic advances, fairness objectives, validation of fairness, and advances in broad accessibility and utility. Funded projects will enable broadened acceptance of AI systems, helping […]

The following is a guest post from Heather Wright, Associate Director of the Center for Evaluating the Research Pipeline (CERP) at the Computing Research Association. The Computing Research Association (CRA) invites the academic computing community to complete a brief survey about the broadening participation in computing (BPC) plans required for proposals submitted to some programs of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Directorate. Specifically, we are interested in learning whether your academic department has created, or plans to create, a Departmental BPC Plan to assist faculty PIs submitting Medium and Large CISE Core Programs, Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace (SaTC), and Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) project proposals, […]

The National Academy of Sciences announced yesterday the election of 120 members and 26 international members in recognition of their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research. They will be inducted at the academy’s annual meeting next year. One of the newly elected members is Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council member Jennifer Rexford! Rexford is the Gordon Y.S. Wu Professor in Engineering in the Department of Computer Science at Princeton University. Membership in the academy is one of the highest honors given to a scientist in the United States. Congratulations, Jen!!

Contributions to this post were provided by Alexandra Chouldechova (Carnegie Mellon University), Sampath Kannan (University of Pennsylvania), and Aaron Roth (University of Pennsylvania).  The Computing Community Consortium held a workshop on Fair Representations and Fair Interactive Learning in 2018, which was led by Aaron Roth from University of Pennsylvania and Alexandra Chouldechova from Carnegie Mellon University. A group of 50 industry, academic, and government experts convened in Philadelphia to explore the roots of algorithmic bias. The workshop report has been highlighted on the front page of the May 2020 CACM Issue, which includes a snapshot of the report that interviewed both Roth and Chouldechova. We tend to believe that algorithmic […]

Passing along this opportunity from TechCongress, an organization focused on bringing technologists and researchers into the halls of Congress to help raise the tech IQ of policymakers and policymaking…  The COVID-19 pandemic has transformed Congress into a remote and virtual institution literally overnight. Capitol Hill was not prepared for this moment and is now confronting a number of urgent digital challenges. Help modernize the digital infrastructure of Congress! TechCongress has launched a Congressional Digital Service Fellowship to recruit a small collaborative tech team for an eight month fellowship to help Congress manage. Learn more from their blog here. This is limited term fellowship in order to: Meet the immediate need […]