The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) will hold a workshop from January 3rd to 5th, 2019 in Hawaii to create a vision for thermodynamic computing, a statement of research needs, and a summary of the current state of understanding of this new area. Workshop attendance will be by invitation only and travel expenses will be available for select participants. We seek short white papers to help create the agenda for the workshop and select attendees. Thermodynamics has a long history in the engineering of computing systems due to its role in power consumption, scaling, and device performance [1],[2]. In a different context, thermodynamically motivated algorithmic techniques are prevalent and highly successful […]

The following Great Innovative Idea is from Mark Bernstein, the chief scientist at Eastgate Systems, Inc. Mark was one of the 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. His paper is called “As We May Hear: Our Slaves of Steel II.” The Idea Everyone’s everyday knowledge work is increasingly tied up with personal agents that one gradually trains to help in the work. In the paper, we imagine a restaurant host (or a diplomatic aide) working with a chorus of audio advisors to identify patrons (or diplomats) and to identify their needs and preferences. Though audio hypertext […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) recently sponsored a Blue Sky Ideas Conference Track at the 29TH ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media, July 9-12, 2018 in Baltimore, MD. The emphasis of this track was on visionary ideas, long-term challenges, and new research opportunities. This track was designed to overcome the constraints of the traditional review process and served as an incubator for innovative approaches, risky and provocative ideas, and to propose challenges and opportunities in the near future. First place: Charlie Hargood, Fred Charles and David Millard- “Intelligent Generative Locative Hyperstructure” Second place: Mark Bernstein and Clare Hooper- “A Villain’s Guide to Social Media and Web Science” Third place: Mark Bernstein- “As We […]

Sam Bowman from New York University provided contributions to this post. The 16th Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (NAACL HLT 2018) was held in New Orleans, June 1 to June 6, 2018. The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) sponsored the 2018 NAACL Student Research Workshop (SRW) in conjunction with NAACL HLT 2018. The SRW gave student researchers in natural language processing (NLP) the opportunity to present their work and receive constructive feedback and mentorship by experienced members of the ACL community. Twenty student participants from nine countries presented original research projects and thesis proposals as both talks and posters during […]

The following Great Innovative Idea is from Orit Peleg an Assistant Professor of Computer Science from the University of Colorado Boulder. Peleg was one of the participants at the recent Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Robotic Materials workshop. The Idea Animals use a combination of egocentric navigation driven by the internal integration of environmental cues, interspersed with geocentric course correction and reorientation. These processes are accompanied by uncertainty in sensory acquisition of information, planning, and execution. Together with L. Mahadevan (Harvard University) and M. Dacke (Lund University), we consider the question of optimal reorientation rates for the navigation of an agent moving along a preferred direction in the presence of multiple sources of noise. This is inspired […]

Former CCC Council member and current CRA Board member Shashi Shekhar from the University of Minnesota provided contributions to this post. The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) Agriculture and Food Research Initiative’s Food and Agriculture Cyberinformatics and Tools (FACT) initiative has issued a call for proposals that 1) focus on fundamental or core big data analytics and tool development, and/or 2) apply big data concepts to specific science domains or across domains and sectors for any of the Plant health and production and plant products program area priorities. A snippet from the USDA/NIFA Request for Applications (RFA): This program area priority focuses […]