The organizing committee for the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) sponsored Promoting Strategic Research on Inclusive Access to Rich Online Content and Services has released their workshop report. The workshop, held in September 2015, brought together almost 40 experts to address the challenges and future research opportunities about access to online content and services. They focused on six active research areas, automatic description of image and video content, online support for deaf people, access to textual content for people with language and learning disabilities, inclusive design of games and simulations, access to large quantitative datasets, maps and 3D printing, and software architecture for configurability. The participants found three main steps that need to be developed in order to […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) sponsored another track in its Blue Sky Ideas Conference Track series at the 29th Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-15), January 25-30, 2015 in Austin, Texas. 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. The winning papers were: Machine Teaching: an Inverse Problem to Machine Learning and an Approach Toward Optimal Education Xiaojin Zhu (Department of Computer Sciences, […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) sponsored another track in its Blue Sky Ideas Conference Track series at the 22nd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE), November 16-22, 2014 in Hong Kong. FSE is an internationally renowned forum for researchers, practitioners, and educators to present and discuss the most recent innovations, trends, experiences, and challenges in software engineering. The goal of this track was to emphasize visionary ideas, long term challenges, and opportunities in software engineering research that are outside of current mainstream topics of the field. This year’s winning papers were: First Prize Methodology and Culture: Drivers of Mediocrity in Software Engineering? Marian Petre and Daniela Damian (Open University, UK; University of Victoria, […]

Judea Pearl received the 2011 ACM A. M. Turing Award “for fundamental contributions to artificial intelligence through the development of a calculus for probabilistic and causal reasoning.” In this guest post, Douglas Fisher, associate professor of computer science and computer engineering at Vanderbilt, summarizes Pearl’s Turing Award Lecture, delivered at last week’s AAAI Conference. Professor Pearl delivered his Turing Award Lecture as the opening invited address at the 26th AAAI Conference in Toronto, Canada, last week. He opened by acknowledging the support of the AAAI community in a great collaborative enterprise, a remarkable “journey” as he said, and he shared the award with the community and his coauthors. He also cited […]

At The Wall Street Journal’s annual CFO Network Conference in Washington, DC, last week, inventor and entrepreneur Ray Kurzweil spoke about “frontiers in technology,” discussing, among other topics, recent advances in artificial intelligence — and what they might mean for the future of the field. During his comments, Kurzweil referenced the Turing test and made an interesting prediction (emphasis added): “Alan Turing in 1950 defined a way in which we can say that a computer is operating at human levels. You have a human judge interview a computer and a human — maybe several of each. If the judge can’t tell which is which, we say the computers have passed the Turing test. […]

The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is holding its A.M. Turing Centenary Celebration in San Francisco, CA, today and Saturday — marking the 100th anniversary of Alan Turing’s birth by bringing together 33 living Turing Award winners for the first time, and raising awareness of Turing, reflecting on his contributions, and discussing the fundamental importance of computing and computer science. The event, which kicks off at 12pm EDT this afternoon, will be streamed live via the web. Over 1,000 in-person attendees are expected. As Vint Cerf, the General Chair for the celebration and himself the 2004 ACM Turing Award winner, writes (following the link):