Passing along this opportunity from TechCongress, an organization focused on bringing technologists and researchers into the halls of Congress to help raise the tech IQ of policymakers and policymaking…  The COVID-19 pandemic has transformed Congress into a remote and virtual institution literally overnight. Capitol Hill was not prepared for this moment and is now confronting a number of urgent digital challenges. Help modernize the digital infrastructure of Congress! TechCongress has launched a Congressional Digital Service Fellowship to recruit a small collaborative tech team for an eight month fellowship to help Congress manage. Learn more from their blog here. This is limited term fellowship in order to: Meet the immediate need […]

Past Computing Community Consortium Council member Daniela Rus, director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), has been appointed to serve on the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST). The council provides advice to the White House on topics critical to U.S. security and the economy, including policy recommendations on the future of work, American leadership in science and technology, and the support of U.S. research and development. “I’m grateful to be able to add my perspective as a computer scientist to this group at a time when so many issues involving AI and other aspects of computing raise important scientific and policy questions for […]

With input from the U.S. Department of Labor’s Office of Child Labor, Forced Labor and Human Trafficking, the National Science Foundation (NSF) recently published a new solicitation on Disrupting Operations of Illicit Supply Networks (D-ISN) “to support the research needed to inform the economy, security, and resilience of the Nation and the world in responding to the global threat posed by illicit supply networks.” The proposal deadline is July 1st, 2020.  Major goals of NSF’s D-ISN include: Improve understanding of the operations of illicit supply networks and strengthen the ability to detect, disrupt, and dismantle them. Enhance research communities that effectively integrate operational, computational, social, cultural and economic expertise to […]

The following is a guest blog post from Computing Community Consortium (CCC) council member Jennifer Rexford from Princeton University.  Over the past few weeks, as I shelter in place like so many of us, I am increasingly grateful for the Internet. A research experiment that escaped from the lab, the Internet has become a critical global infrastructure over the past twenty years. As difficult as the current Covid-19 situation is, at least we can use the Internet to support the global collaboration of scientists, keep abreast of the latest developments, teach our students and children, stay in touch with friends and family, and even find much-needed moments of levity. The […]

From the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy for immediate release. Today, The White House announced the launch of the COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium to provide COVID-19 researchers worldwide with access to the world’s most powerful high performance computing resources that can significantly advance the pace of scientific discovery in the fight to stop the virus. This unique public-private consortium, spearheaded by The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, IBM, the U.S. Department of Energy, and the National Science Foundation, includes the following government, industry, and academic leaders who have volunteered free compute time and resources on their machines: Industry IBM Amazon Web Services Google Cloud Microsoft […]

Yesterday, the President released his FY2021 budget request. The request includes a significant increase in nondefense AI R&D compared to the FY 2020 Budget and a commitment to double nondefense AI R&D by 2022. If enacted, it would bring spending for AI R&D and interdisciplinary research institutes at the National Science Foundation (NSF) to more than $830 million, which represents a more than 70 percent increase over the FY 2020 budget. This increase would map well to A 20-Year Community Roadmap for AI Research in the US, which was released by the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) and the computing research community in late 2019. The roadmap, led by Yolanda Gil […]