The following is a Great Innovative Idea from Josh Deutsch, Professor of Physics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Deutsch was one of the participants at the Computing Community Consortium(CCC) workshop on Thermodynamic Computing in January 2019. Following the Thermodynamic Computing workshop, the CCC sponsored the related Manoa Mini-Symposium on Physics of Adaptive Computation at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. Deutsch was one of the speakers at this mini-symposium and presented on “How to make a computer out of junk DNA.” The Idea There has been a lot of work revisiting the question of the role of so-called “junk DNA” in biology. It turns out that only about 3% of our genome […]

The following Great Innovative Idea is from Francesca Rossi of IBM Research and Nicholas Mattei of Tulane University. They were one of the Blue Sky Award winners at AAAI 2019 for their paper Building Ethically Bounded AI. The Idea The more AI agents are deployed in scenarios with possibly unexpected situations, the more they need to be flexible, adaptive, and creative in achieving the goal we have given them. Thus, a certain level of freedom to choose the best path to the goal is inherent in making AI robust and flexible enough. At the same time, however, the pervasive deployment of AI in our life, whether AI is autonomous or […]

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 Great Innovative Idea is from Jacob Chakareski from the University of Alabama. Jacob published the “Viewport-adaptive Navigable 360-Degree Video Delivery” paper with Xavier Corbillon (IMT Atlantique), Alisa Devlic (Huawei), and Gwendal Simon (IMT Atlantique). It won the best paper award in the Communications Software, Services and Multimedia Applications category at the 2017 IEEE International Conference on Communications. The Idea Virtual and augmented reality (VR/AR) hold tremendous potential to advance our society and are commonly seen as the 4th major disruptive technology wave after PC, the Internet/Web, and mobile. Together with another pair of emerging technologies, 360-degree video and holographic video, they can suspend our disbelief of being at a remote […]

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 […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is launching the “Catalyzing Computing” podcast, which will focus on topics of interest within the computing research community. The podcast is hosted by CCC Program Associate Khari Douglas and will feature interviews with researchers and policy makers about their background and experiences in the computing community. The podcast will also offer recaps of visioning workshops and other events hosted by the CCC. If you want to learn about some of the computing community’s most influential members or keep tabs on the latest areas of interest then, this is the podcast for you! The first episode of Catalyzing Computing features an interview of CCC Council Member Suresh […]