The following Great Innovative Idea is from Christopher B. Harris, the Presidential Diversity Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Engineering at Brown University. Harris presented his poster, Processor Design Exploration for Vision Based Mobile Robots, at the CCC Symposium on Computing Research, May 9-10, 2016. The Idea At Brown University, we’re designing robots! Actually, we’re building the simulation tools used to design mobile robots. Mobile robots require specialized algorithms for tasks such as perception and control. These algorithms are often very processor intensive. As a result, much of the innovation in mobile robotics currently occurs at the software level. Robotics researchers will often devise new algorithms and run them on whatever computing platform is […]

The following Great Innovative Idea is from David Socha from the University of Washington Bothell. Socha and his colleagues, Robin Adams (Purdue University), Kelly Franznick (Blink UX), Wolff-Michael Roth (University of Victoria), Kevin Sullivan (University of Virginia), Josh Tenenberg (University of Washington Tacoma), and Skip Walter (Factor, Inc.), published a paper called Wide-Field Ethnography: Studying Software Engineering in 2025 and Beyond, which was the first place winner at the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) sponsored Blue Sky Ideas Track Competition at the 38th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), May 14-22, 2016 in Austin, TX. The Innovative Idea Wide-field ethnography (WFE) refers to an approach of gathering and collaboratively analyzing large, multi-modal, multi-stream datasets of physical-social-economic-cyber systems (PSECs) in action. While our paper framed the WFE vision around physical-cyber-social systems (PCSSs), our […]

The following Great Innovative Idea is from Gloria Washington, an Assistant Professor of computer science at Howard University. In addition to being an Assistant Professor, Dr. Washington is the Director of the Affective Biometrics Lab. Washington presented her poster, A Socio-Cultural & Technical Approach to Affective Biometrics, at the CCC Symposium on Computing Research, May 9-10, 2016. The Idea Traditional approaches to biometric recognition and affective computing involve using a database to train computer algorithms to recognize different types of individuals and emotional states. However, these databases are usually not diverse and include only subjects from majority populations. Howard University is developing technologies that can use computer vision and affective […]

The following Great Innovative Idea is from Katie Henry, a current PhD student in computer science at Johns Hopkins University. In addition to the department, Henry is also part of the Malone Center for Engineering in Healthcare, the Institute for Computational Medicine, and the Center for Language and Speech Processing. Henry presented her poster, Automated in-patient monitoring in the ICU with application to septic shock prediction, at the CCC Symposium on Computing Research, May 9-10, 2016. The Innovative Idea Traditional approaches to disease prediction involve a panel of experts selecting a small set of clinically meaningful measurements and using these to tabulate a score. While useful, these scores are limited because they require manual […]

The following Great Innovative Idea is from Francesca Rossi from the University of Padova. Rossi and her colleagues Joshua Greene (Harvard University), John Tasioulas (King’s College London), Kristen Brent Venable (Tulane University), and Brian Williams (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) published a paper called Embedding Ethical Principles in Collective Decision Support Systems which was one of the winners at the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) sponsored Blue Sky Ideas Track Competition at the 30th Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-16), February 12-17, 2016 in Phoenix, Arizona. The Innovative Idea We intend to model both ethical principles and safety constraints in (collective) decision making systems. We believe that current AI frameworks to model and reason with preferences, as well as risk-bound reasoning […]

The following Great Innovative Idea is from David H. Ackley from the University of New Mexico. His Indefinite Scalability for Living Computation paper was one of the winners at the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) sponsored Blue Sky Ideas Track Competition at the 30th Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-16), February 12-17, 2016 in Phoenix, Arizona. The Innovative Idea Traditional digital computers employ hardware determinism, meaning that running a program twice on the same inputs is guaranteed to produce the same outputs. Determinism greatly simplifies programming the machine, but ultimately limits its size—and encourages the development of software that is highly efficient, but also extremely fragile, and all but impossible to keep secure. The blue sky idea is […]