The following blog was originally posted in ACM SIGARCH on May 26th, 2020. It is written by Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Chair Mark D. Hill from the University of Wisconsin Madison. Hill is the recipient of the 2019 Eckert-Mauchly award, a lifetime achievement award in computer architecture.  TL;DR: This post reviews some successful visioning in computer architecture and related fields. It argues why visioning is necessary for our field to flourish and discusses how the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) has facilitated some of this. Visioning is especially critical now as disruptions arrive from many quarters. Visioning: The development of a plan, goal, or vision for the future. From Latin videre–to see. “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” […]

The following is an upcoming webinar on how AI is being used in the fight against COVID-19, hosted by NSF, Axios, and the British Embassy. Artificial Intelligence is poised to transform the modern world. In the short term, AI is being deployed like never before to combat COVID-19 as governments, businesses, and health organizations leverage the technology in unprecedented ways to respond to the pandemic. In the long term, AI will represent a step change for the economy, how we live and work, and society at large. If widely adopted, AI could add $330 billion to the UK economy alone by 2030 as it optimizes existing sectors and generates entirely […]

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 […]