About a month ago, at the beginning of this pandemic, the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) blogged about Running a Virtual Conference and highlighted Blair MacIntyre, a professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Interactive Computing and IEEE VR conference co-chair, and Kyle Johnsen, an associate professor in the University of Georgia’s College of Engineering, when they transitioned the IEEE VR 2020 Conference to an all-virtual event. See that blog here. Since then, the research community has started to adjust to this new normal and transition to virtual conferences. This includes the ACM Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS 2020), which was also held online in March. […]

In March 2020, the National Science Foundation (NSF) announced the first ten recipients of the NSF Program on Fairness in Artificial Intelligence in Collaboration with Amazon (FAI).  From the solicitation: NSF and Amazon are partnering to jointly support computational research focused on fairness in AI, with the goal of contributing to trustworthy AI systems that are readily accepted and deployed to tackle grand challenges facing society. Specific topics of interest include, but are not limited to transparency, explainability, accountability, potential adverse biases and effects, mitigation strategies, algorithmic advances, fairness objectives, validation of fairness, and advances in broad accessibility and utility. Funded projects will enable broadened acceptance of AI systems, helping […]

The National Academy of Sciences announced yesterday the election of 120 members and 26 international members in recognition of their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research. They will be inducted at the academy’s annual meeting next year. One of the newly elected members is Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council member Jennifer Rexford! Rexford is the Gordon Y.S. Wu Professor in Engineering in the Department of Computer Science at Princeton University. Membership in the academy is one of the highest honors given to a scientist in the United States. Congratulations, Jen!!

Contributions to this post were provided by Alexandra Chouldechova (Carnegie Mellon University), Sampath Kannan (University of Pennsylvania), and Aaron Roth (University of Pennsylvania).  The Computing Community Consortium held a workshop on Fair Representations and Fair Interactive Learning in 2018, which was led by Aaron Roth from University of Pennsylvania and Alexandra Chouldechova from Carnegie Mellon University. A group of 50 industry, academic, and government experts convened in Philadelphia to explore the roots of algorithmic bias. The workshop report has been highlighted on the front page of the May 2020 CACM Issue, which includes a snapshot of the report that interviewed both Roth and Chouldechova. We tend to believe that algorithmic […]

The American Academy of Arts & Sciences recently announced that more than 250 outstanding individuals have been elected to the Academy in 2020, including Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council member Ronitt Rubinfeld from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Founded in 1780, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences honors excellence and convenes leaders from every field of human endeavor to examine new ideas, address issues of importance to the nation and the world, and work together “to cultivate every art and science which may tend to advance the interest, honor, dignity, and happiness of a free, independent, and virtuous people.” Ronitt joined the Council in 2018 and is a member of […]

The following is a guest blog post from Ran Canetti, a professor of Computer Science at Boston University and the Director of the Center for Reliable Information System and Cyber Security. At the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) we know that everyone is dealing with a lot in these unprecedented times. We are continuing to work on behalf of the computing research community to catalyze research, but we also want to provide ways to help the community. This blog is from a series of posts about ways computing researchers are using computing to adapt and help in these times. We hope you find something that may help you, either now or in the future. In 1945, the atomic bomb brought a swift end […]