The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and IEEE Computer Society recently announced that former Computing Research Association (CRA) and Computing Research Association- Widening Participation (CRA-WP) Board Member and current National Science Foundation (NSF) Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Assistant Director Margaret Martonosi is the recipient of the 2021 Eckert-Mauchly Award. Martonosi is the Hugh Trumbull Adams ’35 Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University, where she has been on the faculty since 1994. In 2018, she led the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) effort to understand the next steps in Quantum Computing for computer science. The Eckert-Mauchly Award is known as the computer architecture community’s most prestigious award. Martonosi was cited […]

Rika Antonova began her CIFellowship in January 2021 after receiving her PhD from KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm in December 2020. Antonova is at Stanford University working with Jeannette Bohg, Assistant Professor of Robotics at Stanford.  Current Project Machine learning is transforming robotics: we can now solve high-dimensional problems that have been intractable before, if given large amounts of data and ample training time. However, to go beyond structured factory settings, it is important for robots to adapt to changes in the environment/task without lengthy re-training and data collection. A related problem is closing the simulation-to-reality gap: adapting to the real world after training in simulation. My goal […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) recently sponsored a Blue Sky Ideas Conference Track at the 20th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, May 3-7th, 2021, online.  The emphasis of this special track was on visionary ideas, long-term challenges, new research opportunities, and controversial debate. It served as an incubator for innovative, risky, and provocative ideas, and aimed to provide a forum for publishing and presenting these without being constrained by result-oriented standards. Best Paper Award: Diverse Auto-Curriculum is Critical for Successful Real-World Multiagent Learning Systems Yaodong Yang, University College London Jun Luo, Huawei Canada Ying Wen, Shanghai Jiao Tong University Oliver Slumbers, University College London Daniel Graves, Huawei Canada Haitham Bou Ammar, Huawei R&D […]

The Computing Research Association (CRA), in consultation with the National Science Foundation (NSF), has appointed five new members to the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council:  Sven Koenig, University of Southern California  Chandra Krintz, University of California, Santa Barbara  William Regli, University of Maryland Mona Singh, Princeton University  Ufuk Topcu, University of Texas at Austin Beginning July 1, the new members will each serve three-year terms. The CCC Council is comprised of 20 members who have expertise in diverse areas of computing. They are instrumental in leading CCC’s visioning programs, which help catalyze and enable ideas for future computing research. Members serve staggered three-year terms that rotate every July. The CCC […]

Biresh Kumar Joardar began his CIFellowship in September 2020 after receiving his PhD from Washington State University in Summer of 2020. Joardar is at Duke University working with Krishnendu Chakrabarty, Distinguished Professor and Chair in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.  Current Project The theme of my current project is “Machine Learning for Machine Learning”. The project aims to demonstrate the symbiotic relationship between machine learning (ML) algorithms and computer system design. In this new paradigm, hardware researchers benefit from new data-driven ML algorithms and ML researchers benefit from efficient computing enabled by new hardware-software co-design. More specifically, I work on designing heterogeneous manycore and in-memory computing architectures with […]

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).  We are pleased to announce the second addendum to the Computing Research Association (CRA) and Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Pandemic Informatics: Preparation, Robustness, and Resilience quadrennial paper on variants of concern (VOC).    A year ago, few experts correctly predicted the toll the pandemic has now taken, nor the extraordinarily rapid development and administration of effective vaccines. Scientists have dramatically increased understanding of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, treatment, and vaccines. Yet, where the pandemic will […]