The current wave of AI innovation, powered by large language models and deep neural networks, has captured the world’s attention. But what comes next? Is the future simply about scaling up what we have now, or are there new, paradigm-shifting ideas waiting to be explored? The authors of CCC’s new whitepaper, Envisioning Possible Futures for AI Research, have tackled this exact question. They’ve identified and described six potential paradigms that could define the next generation of AI. These aren’t just incremental improvements; they are truly revolutionary paths that could reshape the entire field. Join Us for a Live Q&A with Lead Author, David Jensen   We’re hosting a special 30-minute virtual […]

The world is buzzing about artificial intelligence (AI), driven by the remarkable advancements in deep neural networks, large language models, and other types of foundation models. But what’s next? A new whitepaper, “Envisioning Possible Futures for AI Research,” from the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) dives into this crucial question, suggesting that the current wave of AI innovation, while powerful, is built on a paradigm that’s already 15 years old. “The current paradigm, while incredibly successful, is not the endpoint,” says David Jensen, one of the paper’s authors from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. “For AI to continue to progress over the long term, we need researchers to be actively exploring […]

CCC is excited to see how our latest best-practice documents on interdisciplinary research for Funders, Researchers, and Organizational Leaders echo—and amplify—the strategic recommendations from the recent National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine’s (NASEM) report on The Science and Practice of Team Science. Below, we enumerate several recommendations presented in both sets of resources.   1. Seed Funding & Early Stage Support NASEM emphasizes the importance of pilot grants and flexible budgeting for early-stage interdisciplinary work. CRA/CCC’s Best Practices for Funders document mirrors this, recommending dedicated seed-stage funding, travel grants, and support for team-building workshops to kickstart cross-disciplinary collaboration. 2. Structural & Budgetary Flexibility NASEM urges institutions to adapt budgeting, […]

  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 […]