The mission of Computing Research Association’s (CRA) Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is to catalyze the computing research community and enable the pursuit of innovative, high-impact research. CCC conducts activities that strengthen the research community, articulate compelling research visions and align those visions with pressing national and global challenges. CCC communicates the importance of those visions to policymakers, government and industry stakeholders, the public, and the research community itself. In accordance with the mission, CCC is issuing a new call for proposals for activities that will catalyze and enable innovative research at the frontiers of computing. This guide shares further insight about the visioning process, from idea conception through program formation. It includes suggested activities, sample wording, and a […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) recently released the Thermodynamic Computing workshop report, the output of the CCC’s January 2019 visioning workshop of the same name. The workshop was organized by Tom Conte (Georgia Tech), Erik DeBenedictis (former Sandia National Laboratories), Natesh Ganesh (University of Massachusetts Amherst), Todd Hylton (UC San Diego), Susanne Still (University of Hawaii), John Paul Strachan (Hewlett Packard Lab HPE), R. Stanley Williams (Texas A&M). It brought together physical theorists, electrical and computer engineers, electronic/ionic device researchers, and theoretical biologists to explore a novel idea: computing as an open thermodynamic system. The report begins by explaining the need for thermodynamic computers: with the end of Moore’s Law and Dennard […]

We live in a new world. A world where information can spread fast and without any regard to accuracy. Our challenge as individual citizens is to somehow identify the disinformation from the actual information. Kate Starbird and her team from the University of Washington spend time studying this problem and the impact disinformation can have on society. Starbird recently gave a keynote address at the National Science Foundation 2019 Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace Principal Investigator’s Meeting (SaTC PI meeting ’19) in Alexandria, VA on “Bots and Trolls” — Understanding Disinformation as Collaborative Work. As Starbird said in her talk: Disinformation is not simply false information or just about “bots” or […]

The National Science Foundation (NSF), in partnership with the National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA), Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Department of Transportation (DoT), and the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) just announced a new solicitation, titled National Artificial Intelligence (AI) Research Institutes: Accelerating Research, Transforming Society, and Growing the American Workforce, with the goal to “significantly advance research in AI and accelerate the development of transformational, AI-powered innovation by allowing researchers to focus on larger-scale, longer-term research.” The National Artificial Intelligence Research Institutes program anticipates approximately $120 million in grants next year to fund eight planning grants and up to six research institutes in order to advance AI […]

The following post is from Khari Douglas, who is currently at the 2019 Heidelberg Laureate Forum in Heidelberg Germany.  Every year at the Heidelberg Laureate Forum (HLF) a hot topic, or theme, related to mathematics and computer science is chosen to be addressed by a panel of experts. At this year’s HLF the hot topic sessions, which took place on Tuesday, September 24th, focused on climate change and what we can do to tackle the problem. The sessions addressed questions like: “How can we predict the next century’s climate if we can hardly predict this weekend’s weather? Is the latest flooding or heat wave due to climate change, or not? Why […]

Earlier this summer, the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) announced a joint white paper competition with Schmidt Futures on the future of “CS for Social Good.” Schmidt Futures, founded by Eric and Wendy Schmidt, is a philanthropic initiative that bets early on people who will make our world better. The goal of the joint white paper competition was to harness computer science (CS) to address societal challenges. CCC put together a review committee consisting of CCC Council members, who read all submitted proposals and made decisions on the final papers.  The Best Overall Paper was awarded to Connie Moon Sehat from Hacks/Hackers – Credibility Coalition and Ellen Zegura from Georgia Tech […]