The following is a letter to the community from Margaret Martonosi (Assistant Director) of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Directorate of Computer & Information Science & Engineering (CISE). See the Computing Research Association‘s (CRA) bulletin post about CSGrad4US here.  February 2, 2021 Dear Colleagues: The computer and information science and engineering fields are experiencing booming undergraduate enrollments. Many of these undergraduate degree recipients have outstanding job opportunities in industry and at other organizations, and only a small fraction of these individuals considers pursuing related doctoral degree-granting programs. In order to increase the number of diverse, domestic graduate students in these areas and thereby bolster the U.S. population in the Nation’s computer and […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) recently released A National Research Agenda for Intelligent Infrastructure: 2021 Update, which surveys a comprehensive set of earlier intelligent infrastructure whitepapers from 2017 and a more recent set of companion Quadrennial whitepapers on closely related topics. The update then highlights four themes of rising national prominence where intelligent infrastructure can play an enabling role.  Examples of how intelligent infrastructure can have an impact include: COVID-19 pandemic and natural disasters: Intelligent infrastructure such as GIS dashboards, computational simulations, cloud computing, and broadband helped virus monitoring, policy-intervention comparisons, tele-work, tele-education, and  tele-health. New opportunities include National Pandemic Informatics Infrastructure to monitor virus mutations, as well as emergency […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is charged with catalyzing and empowering the U.S. computing research community to articulate and advance major research directions for the field. Established in 2006 through a cooperative agreement between the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Computing Research Association (CRA), the CCC provides a voice for the national computing research community, facilitating the development of a bold, multi-themed vision for computing research and communicating that vision to a wide range of stakeholders. To fulfill its mission, the CCC needs visionary leaders — people with great ideas, sound judgment, and the willingness to work collaboratively to see things through to completion. The Council is composed of 20 researchers representing the breadth […]

Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Vice Chair Dan Lopresti was recently elected president of the International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR).  IAPR is an international association of non-profit, scientific, and professional organizations (national, multi-national, or international in scope) concerned with research in pattern recognition, computer vision, and image processing. IAPR was established in January 1978 and currently consists of 50 national societies, bringing together nearly 10,000 researchers in these fields. The organizational structure of IAPR includes 13 Standing Committees and 17 Technical Committees. IAPR sponsors or endorses several dozen conferences and workshops annually for the benefit of the international scientific community. Lopresti was elected by an international Governing Board at the […]

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 […]

The White House yesterday established a new office focused on coordinating U.S. efforts in Artificial Intelligence research. The new National Artificial Intelligence Initiative Office, under the leadership of Founding Director and current U.S. Deputy Chief Technology Officer Lynne Parker, “is charged with overseeing and implementing the United States national AI strategy and will serve as the central hub for Federal coordination and collaboration in AI research and policymaking across the government, as well as with private sector, academia, and other stakeholders.” See the new logo that features a bald eagle clutching a neural network.  The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) established the new office in accordance […]