Congress recently passed the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, a bipartisan bill which includes $550 billion in new federal spending on infrastructure over five years. President Biden is scheduled to sign the bill into law today (November 13th).   While designed as a traditional infrastructure bill, an analysis of the legislation by the Computing Research Policy Blog found several sections that are of note to the research community and the computing research community specifically: A five-year, $100 million a year SMART grant program at the Department of Transportation (DOT); several intelligent transportation and smart communities pilot programs at DOT; a new ARPA program (ARPA-Infrastructure) at DOT; Division F, a large subsection […]

The National Artificial Intelligence (AI) Research Resource (NAIRR) Task Force convened its third virtual public meeting to further develop a vision and implementation plan for the NAIRR. Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council member Ian Foster (Argonne National Laboratory and University of Chicago), was invited to speak about the recently published A National Discovery Cloud: Preparing the US for Global Competitiveness in the New Era of 21st Century Digital Transformation white paper.  In addition, 84 responses from industry, academia, and government stakeholders were recently released regarding the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the National Science Foundation request for information to develop an implementation roadmap for the NAIRR. […]

Gravitational waves, ‘ripples’ in space-time caused by some of the most violent and energetic processes in the Universe, were first predicted by Albert Einstein in 1916 in his general theory of relativity. Proof of their existence didn’t arrive until 1974. Then on September 14, 2015 the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) physically sensed the undulations in spacetime caused by gravitational waves generated by two colliding black holes 1.3 billion light-years away.  Now, Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council member Ian Foster (Argonne National Laboratory and University of Chicago) and his colleagues have published a paper in the journal Nature Astronomy showing that the hunt for gravitational waves across the universe can […]

The 23rd ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI 2021) will be held in Montreal, Canada October 18-22, 2021. ICMI is the premier international forum for multidisciplinary research on multimodal human-human and human-computer interaction, interfaces, and system development. The main conference themes in 2021 will be behavioral health and virtual connectivity, but other major topics of central interest include human communication and multimodal language/dialogue processing, human-robot/agent interaction, affective computing and social interaction, cognitive modeling, multimodal representations and fusion-based architectures, machine learning for multimodal interaction and system applications, speech, gesture, haptics, olfaction, gaze and vision, multimodal datasets and platforms, mobile and ubiquitous interfaces, interfaces for virtual/augmented reality, smart environments, and assistive technologies. ACM’s ICMI Conference 2021 is pleased to partner […]

The following blog was originally posted in ACM SIGARCH on May 26th, 2020. It is written by Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Chair Mark D. Hill from the University of Wisconsin Madison. Hill is the recipient of the 2019 Eckert-Mauchly award, a lifetime achievement award in computer architecture.  TL;DR: This post reviews some successful visioning in computer architecture and related fields. It argues why visioning is necessary for our field to flourish and discusses how the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) has facilitated some of this. Visioning is especially critical now as disruptions arrive from many quarters. Visioning: The development of a plan, goal, or vision for the future. From Latin videre–to see. “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” […]

The following is a guest blog from Kristin Osborne, Communications Manager at Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, at the University of Washington (UW) and CCC Council member Shwetak Patel, Washington Research Foundation Entrepreneurship Endowed Professor in Computer Science and Engineering and Electrical Engineering, at UW. At the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) we know that everyone is dealing with a lot in these unprecedented times. We are continuing to work on behalf of the computing research community to catalyze research, but we also want to provide ways to help the community. This blog is from a series of posts about ways computing researchers are using computing to […]