Interdisciplinary research in computing is vital for addressing complex societal challenges. However, despite its importance, fostering successful interdisciplinary collaborations remains a significant challenge. The Computing Research Association (CRA) and its Computing Community Consortium (CCC) gathered insights from 40 experts across academia, industry, and government through a series of roundtable discussions to identify challenges in interdisciplinary research. The results of these discussions are being published in a series of best practices documents. The first, published in July 2024, recommended best practices for researchers collaborating on interdisciplinary teams. This second paper of the series focuses on how these collaborations can be better supported by funders, including government agencies, industry, philanthropic donors, […]

The CCC Council’s Addressing the Unforeseen Deleterious Impacts of Technology (AUDIT) task force, composed of Nadya Bliss, Kevin Butler, David Danks, Ufuk Topcu, and Matthew Turk, synthesized the two blog posts they released last month into a Whitepaper that has been released today. The paper compels computing researchers to mitigate future potential harms of their technology by anticipating privacy and security concerns, bias’, and more.  Read this fascinating paper, titled “Addressing the Unforeseen Harms of Technology”, here.

CCC Council Members David Jensen (University of Massachusetts Amherst), Brian LaMacchia (Farcaster Consulting Group, LLC), Ufuk Topcu (University of Texas Austin), and Pamela Wisniewski (Vanderbilt University), wrote a white paper titled “Algorithmic Robustness,” that has just been published on the CCC Website. The group was part of the Socio-technical Resilience Task Force in 2022-23. Computational systems are pervasive throughout every sector of society, and the authors emphasize the need for such systems to be robust. Robustness is the “sustained performance of a computational system in the face of change in the nature of the environment in which that system operates or in the task that the system is meant to […]

The US National Robotics Roadmap was first created 14 years ago. It has since been used by government agencies, universities and companies as a reference about where robotics is going. The first roadmap was published 2009, then revised 2013, 2016 and 2020. The objective is to publish the 5th version of the roadmap by spring 2024. Due to major changes in the world and the robotics landscape, the CCC published a Mid-Cycle Update to the US National Robotics Roadmap this past April. The objective is to engage about 150–200 people from academia and industry to ensure that the roadmap is representative of the community’s view of where robotics is going. […]

April was a big month for the Computing Community Consortium, releasing two workshop reports and one white paper on pressing topics within the computing research community. Overviews of each, as well as individual links to corresponding blog posts are listed below. CCC Releases the Artificial Intelligence/Operations Research Workshop II Report Out In August of 2022, the second AI/OR workshop was held in Atlanta, GA. The second workshop in a three-part series, also supported by INFORMS and ACM SIGAI, was organized by John Dickerson (University of Maryland), Bistra Dilkina (University of Southern California), Yu Ding (Texas A&M), Swati Gupta (Georgia Institute of Technology), Pascal Van Hentenryck (Georgia Institute of Technology), Sven Koenig (University of Southern California), Ramayya Krishnan (Carnegie Mellon University), and Radhika Kulkarni (SAS […]

In honor of National Robotics Week, the Computing Community Consortium is releasing a mid-cycle update to the US National Robotics Roadmap. The US National Robotics Roadmap is updated every four years. Since the last update in September 2020, the world has changed significantly. The COVID pandemic has slowed, there is another administration in Washington, the National Robotics Initiative has officially ended, and the political climate for international trade is constantly changing. Given all these aspects, the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is publishing a minor revision of the roadmap before the next regular update in 2024. In November, the CCC published a call for contributions and input from the community. In […]