The following Great Innovative Idea is from Philip Cohen, Professor (adj) of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence at Monash University (Melbourne, Australia) and President of Multimodal Interfaces, LLC. Cohen was one of the winners from the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) sponsored Blue Sky Ideas Track Competition at the AAAI-20. His winning paper is called Back to the Future for Dialogue Research. Problem Current so-called “conversational assistants”  provide minimal assistance and therefore are of limited utility.  If they are successful in engaging in a dialogue, current systems typically will only perform the transactions that have explicitly been requested of them. But in our everyday human interactions, we expect people not only to infer what we literally say that we want, but […]

Contributions to this post were provided by the Voxel51 team. At the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) we know that everyone is dealing with a lot in these unprecedented times. We are continuing to work on behalf of the computing research community to catalyze research, but we also want to provide ways to help the community. This blog is from a series of posts about ways computing researchers are using computing to adapt and help in these times. We hope you find something that may help you, either now or in the future. Empty parks, X’s taped to the floor in check-out lines, virtual family holidays, these are all part of the new norm thanks to […]

The following Great Innovative Idea is from Hussein S. Al-Olimat from The Ohio Center of Excellence in Knowledge-Enabled Computing (Kno.e.sis) at the Wright State University. Dr. Al-Olimat along with his coauthors Valerie L. Shalin, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan, and Joy Prakash Sain were among the winners at the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) sponsored Blue Sky Ideas Track Competition at the ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems 2019 (SIGSPATIAL 2019) in Chicago, IL. Their winning paper is called Towards Geocoding Spatial Expressions. The Idea The web and social media contain a vast amount of unstructured text with spatial referents. Meaningfully interpreting these referents by geocoding and localizing them is critical to support a wide-range of spatially-aware computing systems, […]

The following great innovative idea is from Konstantin Todorov from the University of Montpellier and a researcher at the LIRMM laboratory within the FADO group. Todorov was one of the Blue Sky Awards at ISWC 2019 for his paper called Datasets First! A Bottom-up Data Linking Paradigm.  The Idea Data linking is understood as the task of establishing typed links between entities across different knowledge graphs via the help of automatic link discovery systems. We argue that the current generic approach to develop data linking solutions has reached its limits and suggest that a paradigm shift in the way we look onto this task needs to take place. We propose to enable the development of data-centric approaches for bottom-up […]

The following great innovative idea is from Mayank Kejriwal and Pedro Szekely from the University of Southern California. Kejriwal and Szekely were one of the Blue Sky Award winners at ISWC 2019 for their paper called Co-LOD: Continuous Space Linked Open Data. The Idea The Web has always been thought of as a collection of discrete elements; for example, the number of people with articles on Wikipedia, the number of likes for a post on Facebook, and so on. The collection of open, interlinked datasets (Linked Open Data) that forms the backbone of the Semantic Web is also discrete.  However, modern deep learning and Artificial intelligence methods operate in continuous spaces or in the realm of real numbers. […]

The following great innovative idea is from Ouri Wolfson, the Richard and Loan Hill Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and an Affiliate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. Ouri was one of the Blue Sky Award winners at ACM SIGSPATIAL ’18 for his paper called Understanding the Human Brain Via its Spatio-temporal Properties. The Idea The human brain is probably the most complex object in the universe, and also one of the least understood. For example, how the brain produces the mind and consciousness is a complete mystery. Nevertheless, the brain is amenable to measurements of various kinds that produce lots of data. It is […]