The Computing Research Association (CRA), in consultation with the National Science Foundation (NSF), has appointed seven new members to the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council: Sujata Banerjee, VMware Elisa Bertino, Purdue University Tom Conte, Georgia Tech Maria Gini, University of Minnesota Chad Jenkins, University of Michigan Melanie Mitchell, Portland State University Katie Siek, Indiana 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 catalyze and enable ideas for future computing research. Members serve staggered three-year terms that rotate every July. The CCC and CRA thank […]

The following Great Innovative Idea is from Barry Smyth, the Digital Chair of Computer Science at University College Dublin and the Director of the Insight Centre for Data Analytics. Dr. Smyth was one of the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Blue Sky Track Conference Winners at AAAI-19 for his paper Recommender Systems: A Healthy Obsession. The Idea The idea of using AI and machine learning to help people to train more effectively for, and race in, marathons, and other endurance events. Impact I believe that it has the potential to change how people exercise, by helping them to train more efficiently and more safely. Other Research I work in the area […]

The following preamble is from Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Chair Mark D. Hill from the University of Wisconsin Madison.  Over the last century, computer systems have been implemented with many technologies that evolve and are occasionally replaced by successors, e.g., discrete transistors with integrated circuits and ferrite core memory with DRAM. Heretofore, these technology transitions have been within—not between—the categories of computing, communication, memory, and storage. Below Steve Swanson reports on a new Intel technology that combines the categories of volatile memory and non-volatile storage in his recent ACM SIGARCH Blog. While we may just use “3DXPoint” conventionally–as separate memory or storage—it has the potential to merge memory and storage for systems […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) recently sponsored a Blue Sky Ideas Conference Track at the 33rd Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-19), January 27- February 1, 2019, in Honolulu, Hawaii. The purpose of this conference was to promote research in artificial intelligence (AI) and scientific exchange among AI researchers, practitioners, scientists, and engineers in affiliated disciplines. The goal of this track was to present ideas and visions that can stimulate the research community to pursue new directions, such as new problems, new application domains, or new methodologies. First place: Pat Langley (Institute for the Study of Learning and Expertise) Explainable, Normative, and Justified Agency Second Place: Francesca Rossi (IBM Research & University of Padova) and Nicholas Mattei […]

This is a blog post by CCC Chair Mark D. Hill of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  As readers on the CCC blog know, the Meltdown and Spectre microprocessor design flaws revealed in early 2018 made clear that many, if not most, computer systems can leak sensitive information via implementation timing “channel.” Fortuitously and concurrent with this revelation, the US National Science Foundation had commissioned a March 2018 workshop on “Side and Covert Channels in Computing Systems” led by Guru Prasadh Venkataramani of George Washington University and Patrick Schaumont of Virginia Tech. The report has just been issued. It provides too many research recommendations to summarize here, but let me whet […]

The following Great Innovative Idea is from Denny Vrandečić of Google. Denny was one of the Blue Sky Award winners at ISWC 2018 for his paper Capturing Meaning: Toward an Abstract Wikipedia. The Idea Currently, Wikipedia is available in almost 300 languages – but the content of all these languages is independently written and maintained. This leads to some language editions having great and up-to-date content on a broad variety of content, and other language editions with struggling having any information about the most core topics an encyclopedia should cover. Also, often knowledge about local ideas are often not available in larger language editions. This is generating and maintaining the imbalance between the different language communities on the […]