The Climate Change AI (CCAI) organization, which is composed of volunteers from academia and industry who believe that tackling climate change requires concerted societal action in machine learning, has announced a new Call for Proposals: Climate Change AI Innovation Grants.  Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) can help support climate change mitigation and adaptation, as well as climate science, across many different areas, for example energy, agriculture, forestry, climate modeling, and disaster response (for a broader overview of the space, please refer to Climate Change AI’s interactive topic summaries and materials from previous events). However, impactful research and deployment have often been held back by a lack of data […]

On May 28th 2021, President Joe Biden released his $6 trillion request for the FY 2022 Federal Budget. A series of blogs analyzing the new budget was posted on the Computing Research Association’s Policy Blog. The budget reflects the new administration’s commitment to science with a 9% increase for Federal investments in government research and development including the following: nearly 20% increase for the National Science Foundation and the creation of a new Directorate of Technology Innovation and Partnerships (TIP) that would focus on technology development and transitioning federally funded research to the marketplace.  7% increase for funding to NASA 6% increase for DOE’s Office of Science  45% increase in […]

As part of efforts to improve scientific integrity, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and the Scientific Integrity Task Force are organizing a series of three virtual listening sessions on July 28-30 to hear from individual members of the public who produce, communicate, and use scientific and technical information. To help the Task Force understand how to strengthen the integrity of Federal Science, please sign-up to make a brief oral comment sharing your thoughts. Each of three virtual listening sessions will be organized around a particular theme as described below: Session 1: Communications – Effective policies and practices to improve the communication of scientific and technological information, […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is pleased to announce the release of a new white paper,  A National Discovery Cloud: Preparing the US for Global Competitiveness in the New Era of 21st Century Digital Transformation, led by Ian Foster with significant support from Daniel Lopresti, Bill Gropp, Mark D. Hill, and Katie Schuman. The three “pillars,” as the paper calls them, of this new computation fabric include the “emergence of public cloud utilities as a new computing platform; the ability to extract information from enormous quantities of data via machine learning; and the emergence of computational simulation as a research method on par with experimental science.”  In order for the […]

Melanie Mitchell, Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council member and Professor at the Santa Fe Institute and Portland State University, was recently on the Munk Debates podcast, in an episode titled “The Rise of Thinking Machines” with Stuart Russell, Professor of Computer Science at the University of California at Berkeley. The podcast, led by Munk Debate chair and moderator Rudyard Griffiths, explores whether the quest for true AI is one of the great existential risks of our time.  Russell believes that if we keep on our current path, AI has the potential to cause real harm. He said, “We need to build a new foundation for AI, but we don’t know […]

Last week the Computing Research Association (CRA) and Computing Community Consortium (CCC) announced the Computing Innovation Fellows (CIFellows) Program for 2021. This program recognizes the significant disruption to the academic job search caused by the pandemic and associated economic uncertainty and aims to help ensure continuity of the research pipeline through disruptions related to COVID-19.  Awards will support an individual for 2 years as a postdoctoral fellow (“CIFellow”) at a host institution of their choosing. CRA will issue subawards to the Host Institution to cover an annual postdoc salary of $75,000, plus fringe and indirect costs (capped at 35%). CIFellows will have the ability to select a Fall 2021 or […]