In 2020, the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) published the quad paper “An Agenda for Disinformation Research,” where seven researchers came together to share the urgency of investing in fundamental research and interventions to meet the disinformation challenge. In today’s digital landscape, misleading information is widespread and causing real-world harms.  Advanced AI-powered detection methods are now essential, given the evolving manipulative tactics like deep fakes, synthesized text, and coordinated disinformation campaigns. Yet, detecting fake information is just the beginning; it’s equally crucial to understand its impact across diverse contexts and develop more resilience in society to misleading and false information. To meet the disinformation challenge, we need investments in fundamental research […]

CCC spoke with one of its council members, Weisong Shi about his passion for autonomous research which led him to start the Connected and Autonomous Research (CAR) Lab. What drove you to start the CAR Lab? In 2016, I worked on edge computing for a while and found that connected autonomous vehicles are a perfect case study of edge computing.  I saw this was a huge transformative way to change the auto industry because a new era for vehicle computing was coming. Since the 1910s, for 100 years, the vehicle has been used to replace horses to ship goods and transport people. But I saw that connected vehicles, particularly autonomous […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is proud to announce that council member Michela Taufer was a keynote speaker at the 53 International Conference on Parallel Computing, one of the oldest continuously running computer science conferences in the field.  Taufer is passionate about engaging with the community on the challenges of handling large data and raising awareness about the importance of equity in science. In her talk, she emphasized that equity goes beyond just providing access to data; it involves empowering every researcher to use that data fully and effectively. It is about turning access into actionable insights and discoveries.  “Speaking at ICPP was a unique opportunity for me to share […]

In this installment of CCC Weekly Computing News, we are sharing an interesting relationship between Minecraft and Arizona State University (ASU) as a part of the The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) AI Forward initiative.  Teaching AI about social intelligence through Minecraft ASU, in partnership with Aptima, a company that develops solutions to optimize and improve human performance in mission-critical, technology-intensive settings, used Minecraft’s immersive and dynamic environment to conduct groundbreaking research on AI’s social intelligence. Through the Artificial Social Intelligence for Successful Teams (ASIST) project, a four-year program funded by DARPA, researchers collected data from over 1,160 Minecraft games, creating the largest publicly available dataset on human-AI team […]

In a series of six engaging roundtable discussions led by the Computing Community Consortium (CCC), 40 computing research experts from academia, industry, and government explored the complexities of interdisciplinary computing.  Their goal: to pinpoint the hurdles and needs for fostering effective cross-disciplinary research. The consensus? Each team member brings a unique set of skills and viewpoints that, while invaluable, can sometimes be challenging to harmonize. Differences in institutional incentives, disciplinary norms, and expectations can complicate collaboration. Based on a qualitative analysis of these discussions and existing research in the field, the task force crafted a best practices document to help researchers navigate the interdisciplinary landscape from start to finish. Here […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is excited to announce that former council member Chad Jenkins has been awarded the 2024 Richard A. Tapia Achievement Award by the Center for Minorities and People with Disabilities in IT (CMD-IT).  This honor recognizes his significant contributions to computing, including his research in robot learning and human-robot interaction, and his efforts to diversify the field. Jenkins, a Professor of Robotics and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Michigan, has made notable impacts in his field, such as developing methods for robots to assist people in everyday settings. He has also been active in leadership roles, including serving as Vice President for […]