The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is pleased to share that former council member Maja Matarić received the 2024-2025 Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Athena Lecturer Award.  Matarić, who also serves as a Principal Scientist at Google DeepMind, is renowned for her trailblazing contributions to the field of socially assistive robotics. Her groundbreaking research, extensive evaluation, and successful technology transfer initiatives have significantly advanced the field. Additionally, she has laid foundational groundwork in multi-robot coordination and human-robot interaction.  Initiated in 2006, the award celebrates women researchers who have made fundamental contributions to computer science. Aside from innovative research, Matarić has been a strong mentor and advocate for underrepresented groups.  In fact, […]

A recent roadmap document organized by over 90 individuals, including CCC council members Holly Yanco and Ufuk Topcu, notes that the field of robotics, which was once pioneered in the United States, has seen a significant shift in global leadership over the past few decades. While the country initially excelled in industrial applications, such as automotive and aerospace, it has now fallen behind, ranking 10th worldwide in robotics adoption. Meanwhile, China has surged ahead, purchasing the majority of robots sold globally. This decline in US robotics dominance comes at a crucial point in the field’s development. Advances in component technologies like materials, embedded systems, and AI are driving exponential growth […]

Computing stands as the cornerstone of modern technological progress, holding immense promise to reshape society for the better. At its essence, it provides a robust framework for problem-solving, automation, and groundbreaking innovation, capable of tackling humanity’s most urgent issues. Whether it’s bolstering healthcare with predictive analytics and tailored treatment strategies or combatting environmental threats through data-driven sustainability initiatives, computing uses transformative power across a spectrum of societal challenges. CCC Council Chair Daniel Lopresti said computing research is important because there are risks that need to be considered. He points to innovations such as surveillance technologies which can be used to violate privacy.  In order to alleviate these risks, researchers need […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is proud to share that council member William “Bill” Gropp was invested as the Grainger Distinguished Chair in Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign on April 30th as a recognition of his exceptional contributions to research, teaching, and leadership within the computer science community.  Gropp serves as the director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), where he has launched programs and resources for the community, such as Illinois Computes. This program offers computing and data storage resources, technical expertise and support services to researchers from all domains across the three universities of the University of Illinois System. His career at the university […]

The following blog post was written by CCC’s Addressing the Unforeseen Deleterious Impacts of Technology (AUDIT) Task Force This article is the second of two related blog posts on proactively addressing the unforeseen harms of technology. In the previous post, we discussed the importance of addressing the negative consequences of technology and the difference between genuinely unforeseen risks and those that could have been foreseen but remained unacted upon. In this article, we will discuss the importance of proactively designing technology to reduce the potential for both foreseen and unforeseen negative consequences. Mitigating risks in the design phase is a common tenet of software engineering. A 2002 report from the […]

The following blog post was written by CCC’s Addressing the Unforeseen Deleterious Impacts of Technology (AUDIT) Task Force Computing technologies of all stripes have brought enormous benefits to people’s lives, but also significant individual and societal harms. As these technologies become increasingly ubiquitous and powerful, we should expect the potential benefits and harms to grow as well. These shifts raise crucial questions about the foreseeability of impacts of the work of computing researchers and developers, as it is much easier to promote benefits and mitigate harms when they can be anticipated. We can ensure wide access (if beneficial), establish guardrails (if problematic), and much more, but only if we actually […]