The National Science Foundation just named the winners of the Alan T. Waterman Award. The annual award recognizes an outstanding young researcher in any field of science or engineering supported by the National Science Foundation. This was the first year that three scientists were recognized. The nation’s highest honor for early career researchers went to Daniel B. Larremore (Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at University of Colorado Boulder), Lara A. Thompson (Associate Professor for the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of the District of Columbia), and Jessica E. Tierney (Associate Professor of Geosciences and Global Change and the University of Arizona).  The fifth Computer Scientist […]

The following Great Innovative Idea is from Yonatan Bisk, Assistant Professor in the School of Computer Science and member of the Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. The Idea Language learning requires physically existing in the world (not being just a brain in a jar). A child doesn’t learn language from reading Wikipedia.  They build rich models of the world by seeing and doing.  They understand other humans as socially intelligent and cooperative agents with whom to speak and from whom to learn.  Yet, natural language “understanding” systems have focused on training in an impoverished disembodied text-only setting — trying to download as much text off the internet and […]

The following Great Innovative Idea is from Somali Chaterji, Assistant Professor in the Department of Agricultural and Biological Engineering at Purdue University where she leads the Innovatory for Cells and Neural Machines. The Idea The idea behind my work is that there is strength in numbers — a distributed computing system that needs to run a computationally heavy application on scarce resources can do so by pooling together many weak to moderate devices in a federated setting and with security guarantees. The secret sauce in my work is to do the right level of approximation at the right point in space (which device) and at the right point in time […]

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 […]

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 […]

The following Great Innovative Idea is from Vincent Conitzer, Kimberly J. Jenkins University Distinguished Professor of New Technologies Professor of Computer Science, Professor of Economics, and Professor of Philosophy at Duke University. Conitzer was one of the winners from the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) sponsored Blue Sky Ideas Track Competition at AAAI HCOMP 2020. His winning paper is called Using Human Cognitive Limitations to Enable New Systems. Motivation My original interest in this line of thinking came from problems associated with a single person being able to create multiple accounts.  This can allow them to vote on the same content multiple times, making online votes meaningless; indefinitely take advantage of a free trial period, resulting in free trial periods of the […]