The following Great Innovative Idea is from Tamraparni Dasu, Yaron Kanza, and Divesh Srivastava of AT&T Labs-Research. They were one of the Blue Sky Award winners at ACM SIGSPATIAL ’18 for their paper Geofences in the Sky: Herding Drones with Blockchains and 5G. The Idea Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), typically also referred to as drones, are gaining popularity and becoming ubiquitous. As the number of drones in the sky rapidly grows, managing the expected high-volume air traffic is becoming a critical challenge. It is essential to prevent collisions, and to protect the public from nuisances like noise or invasion of privacy, and shield from hazards like falling debris. Currently, in many countries drones are required to be within line of sight […]

The following Great Innovative Idea is from Ehsan Hoque, Asaro-Biggar (’92) Family assistant professor of Computer Science and interim Director of the Goergen Institute for Data Science at the University of Rochester. Hoque was a participant and presented a poster at the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Early Career Researcher Symposium, August 1-2, 2018. The Idea Imagine a future where computers can mediate a conversation toward more respectfulness and productivity, help a worker hone their job interview skills or assist a patient diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease by monitoring their symptoms. Our research focuses on developing AI to ethically augment and enhance humanity’s potential. In particular, my group applies machine learning techniques to model the synergy and ambiguity that language, facial […]

The following Great Innovative Idea is from Hien Nguyen, Assistant Professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering at the University of Houston. Hien was a participant and presented his poster at the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Early Career Researcher Symposium, August 1-2, 2018. The Idea Machine learning and artificial intelligence have a great potential to revolutionize medical diagnosis. However, most of existing computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) systems focused on improving the stand-alone performance without considering the interaction with physicians. Therefore, while many studies reported a high level of diagnostic accuracy using CAD systems, there is research showing that the overall performance of doctor-CAD team is lower than that of doctors or the CAD systems in isolation. To address this […]

The following Great Innovative Idea is from Prof. Dr. Heiko Paulheim, Chair for Data Science and Program Director of Mannheim Master in Data Science at the University of Mannheim. Paulheim was one of the CCC Blue Sky winners at the International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC) in October 2018 for his paper called, How Much is a Triple? The Idea Knowledge graphs, i.e., structured collections of knowledge in the form of a graph, are currently widely created and used, both commercially by major Internet companies such as Google and Facebook, as well as open source by researchers, such as DBpedia or Wikidata. While there is a larger body of work on how to create and refine those knowledge graphs, as well […]

The following Great Innovative Idea is from Da Yan, tenure-track assistant professor in the Department of Computer Sciences at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB). Yan presented his poster, A Task-Centric Framework to Revolutionize Big Data Systems Research, at the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Early Career Researcher Symposium, August 1-2, 2018. The Idea Big Data frameworks such as Apache Hadoop and Apache Spark are becoming increasingly popular due to their emphasis on ease of programming, but they are dominantly designed for data-intensive iterative computations, and there lacks an efficient solution to compute-intensive Big Data analytics. Based on my insight that compute-intensive problems are often solved by divide and conquer (e.g., a recursive algorithm), a general task-centric framework, […]

The following Great Innovative Idea is from Mark Bernstein, the chief scientist at Eastgate Systems, Inc. Mark was one of the winners at the recent Computing Community Consortium (CCC) sponsored Blue Sky Ideas Conference Track at the 29TH ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media, July 9-12, 2018 in Baltimore, MD. His paper is called “As We May Hear: Our Slaves of Steel II.” The Idea Everyone’s everyday knowledge work is increasingly tied up with personal agents that one gradually trains to help in the work. In the paper, we imagine a restaurant host (or a diplomatic aide) working with a chorus of audio advisors to identify patrons (or diplomats) and to identify their needs and preferences. Though audio hypertext […]