The following is a Request for Information (RFI) from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy.  The Geothermal Technologies Office (GTO), within the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, announces an RFI seeking feedback from industry, academia, research laboratories, government agencies, and other stakeholders regarding research opportunities associated with applying machine learning techniques toward challenges in the geosciences that are relevant to geothermal energy. With respect to the overall goals of establishing the practice of machine learning in the geothermal industry and maximizing the value of the rich datasets available to the geosciences, GTO is seeking input in three areas: Identifying […]

Shwetak Patel, from the University of Washington, contributed to this post.  Would you like to know how much energy your living room TV is using when it is running? What about when how much it uses while still plugged in and turned “off”? How about checking to see if your newborn baby has jaundice using your smartphone? Would that be helpful? All these practical applications are now possible using a smart sensor in the home and on your phone. The National Science Foundation Science Nation recently went to the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) council member Shwetak Patel’s lab to learn how to use smart sensors to create a breakdown of […]

CCC Council member Maja Mataric from the University of Southern California provided contributions to this post. If we train Artificial Intelligence (AI) to do our work for us it will still need to be periodically checked for errors and random noise. This detailed human oversight is not something we can skip. As AI has more and more power, it will also have more responsibility and the decisions it makes could be deadly if incorrect. We still have so much to learn about building machines that could potentially make life-altering decisions, and we cannot predict what kinds of serious engineering flaws will occur in the future. Michael I. Jordan from the […]

On March 12th-14th, the National Academies of Science held an Arthur M. Sackler Colloquia on Creativity and Collaboration: Revisiting Cybernetic Serendipity. The colloquia, organized by Ben Shneiderman (University of Maryland), Maneesh Agrawala (Stanford), Alyssa Goodman (Harvard), Youngmoo Kim (Drexel), and Roger Malina (UT Dallas), examined the historical framework of cybernetic serendipity –the concept of unplanned creation derived from cybernetic processes. The term is derived from an exhibition of cybernetic art curated by Jasia Reichardt that toured touring the United States in the late 1960s. The colloquia attempted to answer: “How should we re-envision research policy and educational structures to maximize the impact of partnerships with design, art, and humanities? How can we productively engage […]

The following is a letter to the community from James Kurose, Assistant Director, and Erwin Gianchandani, Deputy Assistant Director, of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Directorate of Computer & Information Science & Engineering (CISE).   Dear CISE Community, Much has happened since our email (regarding the President’s FY 2019 Budget Request for the National Science Foundation) last month, and so we wanted to provide an update below. FISCAL YEAR 2018 First and foremost, as you’ve probably read in the media, Congress passed a spending bill for FY 2018 (the current fiscal year, ending on September 30, 2018) this past week, which was signed into law on Friday by the President. Under this FY 2018 budget,  NSF’s funding will […]

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 […]