The Global City Teams Challenge Tech Jam was a success! The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and US Ignite initiative designed to advance the deployment of Internet of Things (IoT) technologies within a smart city / smart community environment was attended by more than 250 people. Representatives of 34 existing teams presented and several new Action Clusters were created during the well-received working sessions. You can find Tech Jam resources here: Presentations Webcast One-Slide Action Cluster Highlights What is next for the Global City Teams Challenge? GCTC Action Cluster teams are working hard to finalize their projects in anticipation of the GCTC Festival in June. Many of the Action Clusters have developed […]

The National Science Foundation (NSF) recently released two Dear Colleague Letters (DCL) describing research opportunities in Europe. Dear Colleague Letter: Research Opportunities in Europe for NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellows Dear Colleague Letter: Research Opportunities in Europe for NSF CAREER Awardees From the DCL: To further scientific and technological cooperation between the European Community and the United States, an Implementing Arrangement was signed on July 13, 2012 to enable U.S. scientists and engineers with NSF-funded CAREER awards and Postdoctoral Research Fellowships to pursue research collaboration with European colleagues supported through EU-funded European Research Council (ERC) grants.   Connecting researchers with complementary strengths and shared interests promotes scientific progress in solving some […]

The evolution of smart machines has transformed and will continue to transform our economy. As smart machines become more advanced, the human and the machine will become even closer coworkers. This has sparked much needed conversations about the future of work. Will only a small fraction of the population have the talent and education necessary to work alongside machines? Or will smart machines create employment possibilities that we cannot begin to imagine, eventually leading to increased economic prosperity? We don’t know yet. This was the subject of the recent Hamilton Project paper and discussion, called “The Future of Work in the Age of the Machine”, inspired by Massachusetts Institute of […]

There has been a tremendous amount of press on the astonishing advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) and the negative impacts that it could have on our society. Former Computing Community Consortium (CCC) council member, Eric Horvitz recently published a piece about the Benefits and Risks of Artificial Intelligence. Others have commented that AI could take our jobs and even potentially kill us. Elon Musk, Tesla chief executive, called artificial intelligence our biggest existential threat at the MIT Aeronautics and Astronautics department’s Centennial Symposium in October. I think we should be very careful about artificial intelligence. If I were to guess like what our biggest existential threat is, it’s probably that. So we need to be very […]

60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl interviewed Dan Kaufman, Director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)’s Information Innovation Office (I2O), for the following clip called Nobody’s safe on the Internet which aired on February 8th. The 13 minute clip highlights how hacking is now a matter of national security, something many in the computer science community have been saying for a long time. As our society continues to become more technologically advanced the situation will only become more serious. Internet connectivity will become embedded in everything from our baby monitors to refrigerators, through Internet of Things technologies, and our privacy and security to be compromised. This is an issue that is beginning […]

Recently, the world’s top leaders and thinkers gathered for the World Economic Forum’s annual conference in Davos, Switzerland. In addition to the great variety of world issues discussed, there were a few discussions on how technology is impacting the economy, laws, and society. Margo Seltzer, a CRA Board Member, traveled to Switzerland for the conference and participated in a panel discussion, “New Cyber World Order,” organized by Harvard University. Since then, the discussion has attracted a lot of attention. While articles in  Digital Journal  and Daily Mail led with the dramatic headline, “Privacy is dead,” Seltzer emphasized to me that the main points conveyed during the session were more practical. Today we share an […]