The Computing Research Association (CRA), in consultation with the National Science Foundation (NSF), has appointed four new members to the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council: Sampath Kannan, University of Pennsylvania Maja Mataric, University of Southern California Nina Mishra, Amazon Research Holly Rushmeier, Yale University Beginning July 1, the new members will each serve three-year terms. The CCC Council is comprised of 20 members who have expertise in diverse areas of computing. They are instrumental in leading CCC’s visioning programs, which help create and enable visions for future computing research. Members serve staggered three-year terms that rotate every July. The CCC and CRA thank those Council members whose terms end on June 30 for their exceptional dedication and […]

The following Great Innovative Idea is from Francesca Rossi from the University of Padova. Rossi and her colleagues Joshua Greene (Harvard University), John Tasioulas (King’s College London), Kristen Brent Venable (Tulane University), and Brian Williams (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) published a paper called Embedding Ethical Principles in Collective Decision Support Systems which was one of the winners at the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) sponsored Blue Sky Ideas Track Competition at the 30th Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-16), February 12-17, 2016 in Phoenix, Arizona. The Innovative Idea We intend to model both ethical principles and safety constraints in (collective) decision making systems. We believe that current AI frameworks to model and reason with preferences, as well as risk-bound reasoning […]

The following is a guest blog post from Ed Lazowska, Bill & Melinda Gates Chair in Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington and Founding Chair of the Computing Community Consortium (2007-2013).  The 2016 U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) job projections have recently been released, covering the decade 2014-2024. As in all recent BLS projections, computing occupations dominate STEM: computing occupations are projected to account for 73% of all newly-created STEM jobs during the decade (488,500 jobs), and 55% of all available STEM jobs, whether newly-created or available due to retirements (1,083,800 jobs over the decade). Of course, there are asterisks associated with any projection. And there are double asterisks associated […]

Contributions to this post were made by Elizabeth Mynatt, CCC Vice Chair and Executive Director of the Institute for People and Technology at Georgia Tech. Dr. Mynatt was a member of the President’s Council of Advisors for Science and Technology (PCAST) working group on aging and technology and led the Computing Community Consortium’s (CCC) Aging in Place workshop. Recently, the New York Times published an article on A Push for Less Expensive Hearing Aids. The article highlighted the findings in a recent PCAST report on aging and technology. The report stated that almost two-thirds of Americans over the age of 70 have some kind of hearing loss, however many of them […]

The following Great Innovative Idea is from David H. Ackley from the University of New Mexico. His Indefinite Scalability for Living Computation paper was one of the winners at the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) sponsored Blue Sky Ideas Track Competition at the 30th Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-16), February 12-17, 2016 in Phoenix, Arizona. The Innovative Idea Traditional digital computers employ hardware determinism, meaning that running a program twice on the same inputs is guaranteed to produce the same outputs. Determinism greatly simplifies programming the machine, but ultimately limits its size—and encourages the development of software that is highly efficient, but also extremely fragile, and all but impossible to keep secure. The blue sky idea is […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Convergence of Data and Computing Task Force, led by CCC Council Members Vasant G. Honavar from Pennsylvania State University, Mark D. Hill from University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Katherine Yelick from University of California at Berkeley, has just released another community white paper called Accelerating Science: A Computing Research Agenda. This white paper seeks to articulate a research agenda for developing cognitive tools that can augment human intellect and partner with humans on the scientific process. The recent advances in sensing, measurement, storage and communication technologies and the resulting emergence of “big data” offer unprecedented opportunities for not only accelerating scientific advances, but also enabling new modes of discovery. However, there is a huge gap […]