Is your 2-year-old smarter than your computer? Yes, simply because she is human. While she might not know how to read or do simple addition, she has the uniquely human ability to rationalize. She can take a small piece of information and abstract it. That is what makes her smarter than a computer. And that is what we need to train computers to do. This was one of the big topics of discussion on the first day of the 6th Heidelberg Laureate Forum. John E. Hopcroft, from Cornell University, presented a talked called “An Introduction to AI and Deep Learning.” Hopcroft started with a simple example. He recalls reading a […]

The 6th Heidelberg Laureate Forum (HLF) has begun! Two hundred young researchers from 60 different countries have come to Heidelberg to learn from 33 Laureates. The event kicked off last night with a welcoming ceremony and dinner. The buzz on Twitter this morning, if you missed it, was about whether Sir. Michael Francis Atiyah had solved the Riemann Hypothesis (one of the Millennium Problems). Atiyah presented the Hypothesis and then in one brief slide showed his proof, which he claims solved the Hypothesis. Whether or not he did solve it, is up to our mathematician colleagues to tell us. None-the-less it was exciting to see a famous mathematician in his element. See the full video […]

I‘ve been blogging for the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) for over four years, but I‘ve never actually written in first person. So, hello. I’m Helen Wright, a biologist by training, but I’ve been working in computer science and science policy for over six years. I’m passionate about science communication and informing the scientific community about computing and how it can impact national priorities, cool research, and upcoming events. This fall, I’ve been given the unique opportunity to be a part of the upcoming Heidelberg Laureate Forum’s (HLF) international blog team. The Heidelberg Laureate Forum is an annual event held in Heidelberg Germany. Currently, in its 6th year, the HLF is […]

The Computing Research Association seeks a highly motivated individual to serve as a Deputy Director for the Computing Community Consortium. The Deputy Director works with the CCC Director, Council Members, and the CRA staff to ensure that the CCC succeeds in its mission: to serve as a catalyst and enabler for the computing research community, to provide mechanisms for the community to identify compelling research visions for the future of the field and to articulate those visions to key stakeholders. The Deputy Director provides backup to the Director in order to ensure that the CCC functions smoothly and effectively, and meets all of its contractual requirements in a timely and […]

The following Great Innovative Idea is from Da Yan, tenure-track assistant professor in the Department of Computer Sciences at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB). Yan presented his poster, A Task-Centric Framework to Revolutionize Big Data Systems Research, at the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Early Career Researcher Symposium, August 1-2, 2018. The Idea Big Data frameworks such as Apache Hadoop and Apache Spark are becoming increasingly popular due to their emphasis on ease of programming, but they are dominantly designed for data-intensive iterative computations, and there lacks an efficient solution to compute-intensive Big Data analytics. Based on my insight that compute-intensive problems are often solved by divide and conquer (e.g., a recursive algorithm), a general task-centric framework, […]

The following Great Innovative Idea is from Mark Bernstein, the chief scientist at Eastgate Systems, Inc and Clare Hooper, an Independent Scholar in Vancouver, BC, Canada. Mark and Clare were winners at the recent Computing Community Consortium (CCC) sponsored Blue Sky Ideas Conference Track at the 29TH ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media, July 9-12, 2018 in Baltimore, MD. Their paper is called “A Villain’s Guide To Social Media And Web Science.” The Idea The great power and profitability of social media may not benefit the good and the bad alike; increasing evidence indicates that recent advances in data mining, social media, and web science all asymmetrically benefit the cruel, the dishonest, and the tyrant. Daily headlines reflect the appropriation and misuse of […]