The following Great Innovative Idea is from John E. Laird from the Unversity of Michigan. Laird was one of the Blue Sky Award winners at the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Conference (AAAI-18) for his paper, coauthored with Shiwali Mohan from the Palo Alto Research Center, on Learning Fast and Slow: Levels of Learning in General Autonomous Intelligent Agents. The Idea Our cool idea is that there are two distinct levels at which humans and general AI systems can learn. Level 1 encompasses innate architectural learning mechanisms that are automatic, online, and effortless – capturing knowledge from the agent’s ongoing experience, such as learning skills, experiential knowledge, or facts. Level 2 encompasses deliberate learning strategies that are realized through the […]

The South Big Data Hub’s next Data Science Roundtable called The Future of Work: Intelligent Machines, Automation, and Social Impacts will be held Thursday, April 12th from Noon – 1:15 PM EST. As technological innovation rapidly continues to accelerate, skill requirements for workers are changing even more quickly. These evolving skill requirements are having disruptive effects on higher education and training programs, which are struggling to catch up to the needs of both workers and industries. In this session, the panelists will expire some of the many important questions related to the future of work, training, education, and technology. Speakers: Kevin Crowston, Distinguished Professor, Syracuse University Gordon Freedman, President, National Laboratory for Education Transformation Ioana Marinescu, Faculty Research Fellow, Bureau of Economic Research Shade Shutters, Global […]

Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Executive Council member Jennifer Rexford from Princeton University will present “Hitting the Nail on the Head: Interdisciplinary Research in Computer Networking,” part of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Computer & Information Science & Engineering (CISE) Distinguished Lecture series on April 4th, from 2:00PM to 3:00PM ET. Jennifer Rexford is the Gordon Y.S. Wu Professor of Engineering and the Chair of Computer Science at Princeton University. Before joining Princeton in 2005, she worked for eight years at AT&T Labs—Research. Jennifer received her BSE degree in electrical engineering from Princeton University in 1991, and her PhD degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the University of Michigan in 1996. She is co-author of the […]

CCC Chair Elizabeth Mynatt from Georgia Tech and former CCC Council member Shashi Shekhar from the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, provided contributions to this post. How can we really be sure that autonomous vehicles are safe? Is a road test the way to do it, or do we need to test every software patch in a vehicle before it gets on the highway? Why did Walmart file a patent for robotic bee pollinators? One of the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) sessions at the recent 2018 American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Annual Meeting in Austin, TX was on Transforming Cities, Transportation, and Agriculture with Intelligent Infrastructure and these […]

Between December 2016 and August 2017, at least 24 employees of the U.S Embassy in Cuba heard high-pitched sounds and suffered injuries thought to be related to the noise. Many speculated that the high-pitched sounds were some high-frequency sonic weapon. When Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council member, Kevin Fu from the University of Michigan, looked at the spectral plot of the clip he saw some unusual ripples. Fu worked with his collaborator, Wenyuan Xu, a professor at Zhejiang University, in Hangzhou, China, and her Ph.D. student Chen Yan, and through a series of simulations, saw that an effect known as intermodulation distortion could have produced the sound. Intermodulation distortion occurs when […]

Contributions to this post were provided by Executive Council Member Dan Lopresti, Michael Dunaway, Robin Murphy, and Nalini Venkatasubramanian. Cell towers on wheels? Monitoring Twitter? These are just some ideas of how to monitor disasters and inform the public during an emergency situation. One of the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) sessions at the recent 2018 American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Annual Meeting in Austin, TX was on Rethinking Approaches to Disaster Management and Public Safety with Intelligent Infrastructure and these ideas were brought up during the discussion. The session was moderated by CCC Executive Council Member Dan Lopresti, from Lehigh University, with participating speakers Michael Dunaway (University […]