A new episode of the Computing Community Consortium‘s (CCC) official podcast, Catalyzing Computing, is now available. In this episode, Khari Douglas (CCC Senior Program Associate) interviews Dr. Katie Siek, a professor in Informatics and the Chair of Informatics at Indiana University – Bloomington. Dr. Siek is interested in integrating pervasive technologies in health and wellness environments to study how technology affects interventions. Her research interests include human computer interaction, ubiquitous computing, and health informatics. In this episode, Katie discusses health informatics, fitness trackers, data ownership, and aging in place. Listen to the episode here. Below is a transcription from part of the discussion about aging in place. It is lightly edited for […]

Contributions to this post were provided by Elizabeth Bradley (University of Colorado Boulder), Madhav Marathe (University of Virginia), Melanie Moses (The University of New Mexico), William D Gropp (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign), and Daniel Lopresti (Lehigh University).  In Fall 2020, the Computing Research Association (CRA) released a series of planned white papers produced through its subcommittees (including the Computing Community Consortium (CCC)), exploring areas and issues around computing research with the potential to address national priorities over the next four years. Called Quadrennial Papers, the white papers attempt to portray a broad picture of computing research detailing potential research directions, challenges, and recommendations for policymakers and the computing research community.  […]

Melanie Mitchell, Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council member and Professor at the  Santa Fe Institute and Portland State University was recently interviewed on the Medscape podcast, Medicine and the Machine in an episode titled ‘Can AI Exist in Medicine Without Human Oversight?. The podcast, led by Medscape editor-in-chief Eric Topol and Abraham Verghese from Stanford, explores critical questions and discussions on artificial intelligence’s (AI) impact on modern medicine. While it was acknowledged that AI has made great strides in the past decade on accomplishing narrow tasks, the episode highlights that the technology still lacks the ability to work autonomously in the field of medicine. Making this a possibility would require […]

Recently, the Computing Research Association’s Computing Community Consortium (CCC) released a white paper called Pandemic Informatics: Preparation, Robustness, and Resilience, by Elizabeth Bradley (University of Colorado Boulder), Madhav Marathe (University of Virginia), Melanie Moses (The University of New Mexico), William D Gropp (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign), and Daniel Lopresti (Lehigh University). It is part of the series of white papers called Quadrennial Papers that explore areas and issues around computing research with potential to address national priorities.  The Pandemic Informatics paper outlines an effective strategy to reduce the national and global burden of pandemics. It includes (i) detect timing and location of occurrence, taking into account the many interdependent driving […]

The following is a guest blog post from Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council member Katie Siek, Indiana University.  Automated, proximity-based contact tracing apps use Bluetooth to identify who is near them. In theory, this is a great solution that can be efficiently deployed widely (albeit with many privacy and protocol considerations addressed here), however the assumption is that people have access to mobile phones with Bluetooth and use technology similarly. We know that not everyone has access to smartphones. Pew notes that approximately 70% of Americans who make less than $30,000 a year own a smartphone. Similar stats are seen for Americans who live in rural areas and those with […]

What if we could link the Framingham Heart Study (NHLBI) with Alzheimer’s health data (NIH) to better understand the correlative effects in cardiovascular health with aging and dementia? What if journal articles could directly link to repository data sets and the software used for the analysis of those same data? The number of possible discoveries could increase. The proliferation of data, and the accompanying computing resources and new algorithms, brings new opportunities for discovery, as well as new challenges. This is especially important during our current health crisis. This is what the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is hoping to do through their Strategic Plan for Data Science – modernize […]