The Biden administration today appointed Stefanie Tompkins to run the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) as its 23rd Director. DARPA is a $3.5 billion a year research and development agency of the United States Department of Defense, whose mission is to make pivotal investments in breakthrough technologies for national security. From the press release:  “With nearly eleven years of DARPA service under her belt, Tompkins, a former military intelligence officer in the U.S. Army, has an exceptional understanding of the agency’s culture. From 2007 through 2017, she held multiple positions, including program manager and deputy director of the Strategic Technology Office, a systems-oriented technical office; DARPA chief of staff; […]

The 23rd ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI 2021) will be held in Montreal, Canada October 18-22, 2021. ICMI is the premier international forum for multidisciplinary research on multimodal human-human and human-computer interaction, interfaces, and system development. The main conference themes in 2021 will be behavioral health and virtual connectivity, but other major topics of central interest include human communication and multimodal language/dialogue processing, human-robot/agent interaction, affective computing and social interaction, cognitive modeling, multimodal representations and fusion-based architectures, machine learning for multimodal interaction and system applications, speech, gesture, haptics, olfaction, gaze and vision, multimodal datasets and platforms, mobile and ubiquitous interfaces, interfaces for virtual/augmented reality, smart environments, and assistive technologies. ACM’s ICMI Conference 2021 is pleased to partner […]

The following Great Innovative Idea is from Yaron Kanza (AT&T Labs-Research), David Gibbon (AT&T Labs-Research), Divesh Srivastava (AT&T Labs-Research), Valerie Yip (AT&T Labs-Research), and Eric Zavesky (AT&T Labs-Research). The team’s paper, Smartmedia: Locally & Contextually-Adapted Streaming Media, won first-place in the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) sponsored Blue Sky Ideas Track Competition at the 28th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems.  The Idea Streaming media is gaining popularity, with numerous new services for video on demand and live broadcast. Often, streaming media is consumed on mobile devices, like smartphones and tablets, in different locations and contexts. In the novel approach we present, named Smartmedia, the streamed content […]

Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council Member, Professor of Computer Science at the University of New Mexico and External Faculty Member at the Santa Fe Institute, Melanie E. Moses, recently published an article in Nautilus titled, “How to Fix the Vaccine Rollout: A computational biologist charts a fair and efficient course for vaccine distribution.” A year after the onset of COVID-19, the development and approval of vaccines provides hope that the pandemic nightmare is nearing an end. With countries facing second or third waves and, in many places, cases hitting an all time high, vaccinating our most vulnerable populations as quickly as possible is essential. Unfortunately, until now, the vaccine rollout […]

Contributions to this post were provided by CCC Vice Chair Daniel Lopresti.  AI for Good Global Summit hosted a webinar on AI to Prevent Modern Slavery, Human Trafficking and Forced and Child Labour today and featured Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Executive Council Member Nadya Bliss (Executive Director of the Global Security Initiative at Arizona State University) as well as Alice Eckstein (Programme Manager, Modern Slavery Programme at United Nations University – Centre for Policy Research), Doreen Boyd (Professor of Earth Observation, Faculty of Social Sciences at University of Nottingham), James Goulding (Deputy Director N/LAB, Faculty of Social Sciences at University of Nottingham) and Anjali Mazumder (Thematic Lead on AI, Justice […]

The following Great Innovative Idea is from Daniel Larremore, Assistant Professor at University of Colorado Boulder Computer Science Department and the BioFrontier Institute, where he leads Larremore Lab. In addition, he holds affiliations with the Department of Applied Mathematics and with the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. His recent work with COVID-19 has captured the attention of large media sources such as Medscape, the Washington Examiner and the New York Times. The Idea How does the progression of a typical SARS-CoV-2 infection affect the way we should think about COVID-19 policies, like testing and vaccine prioritization? When doing mathematical and computational […]