The National Science Foundation (NSF) announced recently the selection of four grand prize and three meritorious prize winners for its first-ever NSF 2026 Idea Machine prize competition. One of the winners, Vincent Conitzer (Duke University), was at the second AI Roadmap workshop on Interaction in January 2019. Conitzer’s challenge is to discover models of conscious experience. See the press release below to learn more.  The NSF 2026 Idea Machine encouraged individuals from all walks of life, age 14 or older, to submit pressing “grand challenges” requiring fundamental research in science, engineering, or STEM education in order to inform NSF’s long-term planning. Approximately 800 entries were received from nearly every state […]

The 7th annual Heidelberg Laureate Forum (HLF) has officially begun! Yesterday (September 21st) was the opening ceremony, which included a “science slam” on the history and founding of HLF from Andreas Reuter, Scientific Chairperson of the Heidelberg Laureate Forum Foundation, as well as a Q&A session with Cherri M. Pancake, President of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), Carlos E. Kenig, President of the International Mathematical Union (IMU), and Hans Petter Graver, President of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters (DNVA). To top it off the opening ceremony was followed by a reception, giving the young researchers opportunities to mingle with each other and the 23 laureates in mathematics and computer science that are in attendance. During the Q&A session, Cherri Pancake was asked about the […]

Computing Community Consortium (CCC) council member Shwetak Patel, Director of the Ubicomp Lab at University of Washington, will be giving the next free ACM TechTalk on “The Emerging Role of Mobile Computing in Health” on Thursday, August 1 at 2:30 PM ET/11:30 AM PT.

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Industry Collaboration working group recently released the Evolving Academia/Industry Relations in Computing Research: Interim Report. This report outlines a number of emerging trends within computing research, most importantly the rising level of interaction between professors and industry. These trends have been shaped by access to industry resources such as cloud computing, AI, and big data. As those resources become more valuable, computing researchers in academia are leaving for or entering into joint appointments with industry in order to gain access to those key assets. From the Interim report: Modern industrial deep learning models, like the BERT language model recently published by Google[1], have hundreds of […]

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has released a Dear Colleague Letter (DCL) calling for proposals “to the Operations Engineering program into operational methods to discover, disrupt and disable illicit supply networks,” such as those that enable human trafficking and the sale of illegal weapons, drugs, and animals. While this call is lead by the NSF’s Engineering Directorate, proposals will require expertise in social and computational science and the DCL includes NSF’s Directorates for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) and Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences (SBE). Related to this fight against illicit supply networks, the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) recently cosponsored the Code 8.7: Using Computation Science and AI to […]

On February 19-20, 2019 the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) co-sponsored the Code 8.7: Using Computation Science and AI to End Modern Slavery with the United Nations University Centre for Policy Research, The Alan Turing Institute, Tech Against Trafficking, University of Nottingham Rights Lab, and Arizona State University Global Security Initiative. Code 8.7 brought together computer science researchers and technologists with policy researchers, law enforcement officials, and activists involved in the fight against human trafficking. Code 8.7 was named after Target 8.7 of the Sustainable Development Goals. With Target 8.7, 193 countries agreed to take immediate and effective measures to end forced labor, modern slavery, and human trafficking by 2030, and the worst forms of child […]