Earlier this week the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which is the United Nations body for assessing the science related to climate change, released their Climate Change 2021- The Physical Science Basis Report. The report is sobering. We know that human activity is changing the climate in unprecedented and sometimes irreversible ways, but this recent report warns of increasingly extreme heatwaves, droughts and flooding, and a key temperature limit being broken in just over a decade. It shows how catastrophic the outlook will be if we don’t act now.  The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) has released a new whitepaper on Computing Research for the Climate Crisis, coauthored by Nadya […]

The CRA is excited to announce the launch of an Opportunity Board to enable recent new PhD graduates and members of the community that are looking for postdocs to connect. This is a continuation of the Opportunity Board used to match potential postdocs and mentors during the CIFellows 2021 process. The board allows for the posting of postdoc opportunities by potential mentors and posts by those looking for a postdoc opportunity. We encourage members of the community to use this as a resource. The Opportunity Board lists four options: Find Mentor Find Postdoc Post Mentor Profile Post Postdoc Profile  You are able to search for potential postdocs and available postdoc […]

Recently, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists — a media organization that “equips the public, policymakers, and scientists with the information needed to reduce man-made threats to our existence” and is famous for their Doomsday Clock — held a virtual program titled, “The Artificial Intelligence Era: What will the future look like.”  Nadya Bliss, a Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Executive Council member and the Executive Director of the Global Security Initiative at Arizona State University, moderated the program. The speakers were Eric Horvitz, Chief Scientific Officer at Microsoft and a former CCC Council member, and Mary (Missy) Cummings, the director of Duke’s Humans and Autonomy Laboratory and a co-organizer of […]

Yesterday, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy’s National Artificial Intelligence (AI) Initiative Office launched the new AI.gov website.  This website is the home of the National AI Initiative Act of 2020 and as stated in the press release “the connection point to ongoing activities to advance U.S. leadership in AI from policy documents and strategies, to applications of AI, to the latest news and updates from the agencies and federal advisory boards helping shape the activities of the National AI Initiative.”  National AI Initiative Act of 2020 became law on January 1, 2021, providing for a coordinated program across the entire Federal government to accelerate AI research […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is pleased to announce the release of a new white paper,  A National Discovery Cloud: Preparing the US for Global Competitiveness in the New Era of 21st Century Digital Transformation, led by Ian Foster with significant support from Daniel Lopresti, Bill Gropp, Mark D. Hill, and Katie Schuman. The three “pillars,” as the paper calls them, of this new computation fabric include the “emergence of public cloud utilities as a new computing platform; the ability to extract information from enormous quantities of data via machine learning; and the emergence of computational simulation as a research method on par with experimental science.”  In order for the […]

This message was brought to you by the National Science Foundation Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering. The Broadening Participation in Computing program (BPC) aims to significantly increase the number of U.S. citizens and permanent residents receiving post-secondary degrees in the computer and information science and engineering (CISE) disciplines, and to encourage participation of other groups underrepresented in the CISE disciplines. PIs with active Medium and Large CISE Core programs awards funded in the last three years (specifically pursuant to solicitations NSF 20-591, 19-589. 18-569, 18-568, and 18-570) are invited to submit supplemental funding requests to engage more members of the CISE research community in significant BPC efforts […]