Climate change is a hot topic that has ongoing conversations in every field imaginable, computer science being no exception. Researchers and scientists are increasingly concerned about the negative impacts computing has on the environment. While car exhaust, carbon footprints from factories and other obvious forms of pollution take the forefront in people’s minds – everyday actions done on the computer such as downloading a movie, flipping through TikTok or streaming YouTube videos uses a considerable amount of energy. In addition, technology such as laptops and phones contain a lot of toxic chemicals and heavy metals that infiltrate the environments upon disposal. Computer scientists are starting to rethink the way we […]

The Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) National Coordination Office (NCO) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) recently released a request for information (RFI) on Federal Priorities for Information Integrity Research and Development. The purpose of the RFI is to gain input on how to “enable research and development activities to advance the trustworthiness of information, mitigate the effects of information manipulation, and foster an environment of trust and resilience in which individuals can be discerning consumers of information.” There is so much information on the internet these days and so few ways for the general public to verify what is true and what is not. This has […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) recently released the Research Opportunities in Evidence-Based Elections white paper, written by Josh Benaloh (Microsoft Research), Philip B. Stark (University of California, Berkeley), Vanessa Teague (Australian National University), Melanie Volkamer (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology), and Dan Wallach (Rice University).  This white paper highlights the need for evidence-based elections, which can convince people that the results of elections are accurate, and suggests several technologies that could play a role in this, mostly focused on risk-limiting audits and end-to-end verifiability.  “A risk-limiting audit (RLA) is any procedure with a known minimum chance of correcting the reported electoral outcome if the reported electoral outcome is wrong—that is, if […]

Bayer, the pharmaceutical company that owns big name brands such as Aspirin, Aleve, Midol, Cenesten and Iberogast, recently partnered with Ada Health, an AI-based assessment platform. This free app uses an AI chat robot to collect information on symptoms, patient history and other user targeted questions to generate data-driven suggestions for next steps and proper care. “Ada’s technology is based on a custom-built reasoning engine and a highly comprehensive medical knowledge base, covering thousands of conditions. In fact, in a recent vignettes study testing the eight most popular online symptom assessment apps, Ada was proven to have the most comprehensive condition coverage, providing a condition suggestion 99% of the time, […]

The Climate Change AI (CCAI) organization, which is composed of volunteers from academia and industry who believe that tackling climate change requires concerted societal action in machine learning, has announced a new Call for Proposals: Climate Change AI Innovation Grants.  Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) can help support climate change mitigation and adaptation, as well as climate science, across many different areas, for example energy, agriculture, forestry, climate modeling, and disaster response (for a broader overview of the space, please refer to Climate Change AI’s interactive topic summaries and materials from previous events). However, impactful research and deployment have often been held back by a lack of data […]

Contributions to this post were provided by Elizabeth Bradley (University of Colorado Boulder), Madhav Marathe (University of Virginia), Melanie Moses (The University of New Mexico), William D. Gropp (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign), and Daniel Lopresti (Lehigh University).  We are pleased to announce the second addendum to the Computing Research Association (CRA) and Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Pandemic Informatics: Preparation, Robustness, and Resilience quadrennial paper on variants of concern (VOC).    A year ago, few experts correctly predicted the toll the pandemic has now taken, nor the extraordinarily rapid development and administration of effective vaccines. Scientists have dramatically increased understanding of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, treatment, and vaccines. Yet, where the pandemic will […]