Today is day 4 of the 11th Heidelberg Laureate Forum, and throughout the week I have been asking the computing laureates to identify the grandest grand challenges in computing research, and extrapolating grand challenges based on relevant lectures and discussions. Here are some of the challenges that emerged: Increasing Data Efficiency of Computing Systems. Dr. Alexei Efros posited that computers need to require less data to perform well in order to solve a wider range of problems. While children are very good at learning from a few examples, computers are much less data efficient.  Improving Accuracy of Large Language Models. Dr. Vinton Cerf identified hallucination as a significant problem with […]

Previous CCC Council Member Shwetak Patel’s research was recently featured in a ZME Science article “Can we screen the world? How smartphones and watches are revolutionizing global health (and just getting started)”. A new frontier of personalized medicine has arrived with the help of smart technologies such as smartphones and watches. These technologies help doctors detect and as a result efficiently fix health conditions. Almost everyone has a smartphone, and these devices collect a lot of information about us: steps, sleep, heart rate, etc. Shwetak Patel, a researcher, is leading efforts to use smartphones and their sensors for health purposes. He believes smartphones can do a lot more in health […]

Computer scientists have been attempting to harness the power of quantum computing for over two decades. Traditional computers perform calculations sequentially, one at a time. In contrast, quantum computers leverage the unique properties of sub-atomic particles, such as existing in multiple places simultaneously and demonstrating instantaneous connections across vast distances to successfully transfer quantum information between computer chips at unprecedented speeds and accuracy. So far, institutions such as Google, IBM and Microsoft have only been able to achieve simple quantum machines. A new breakthrough development in quantum, led by Professor Winfried Hensinger of Sussex University and highlighted in a recent BBC article, promises to move the needle closer to harnessing […]

The The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) recently sponsored a Blue Sky Ideas Conference Track at the ICMI 24th ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction. The conference was held in Bengaluru (Bangalore), India on on November 7-11th. 1st Place: “On the Horizon: Interactive and Compositional Deepfakes” by Eric Horvitz, Microsoft. 2nd Place: “Beyond the Blue Sky of Multimodal Interaction: A Centennial Vision of Interplanetary Virtual Spaces in Turn-based Metaverse” by Lik Hang Lee (KAIST), Carlos Bermejo (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology), Ahmad Alhilal (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology), Tristan Braud (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology), Simo Hosio (University of Oulu), Esmée de Haas, and Pan Hui Hong Kong University of Science […]

The Computing Community Consortium just held a two-part workshop, “Building Resilience to Climate Driven Extreme Events with Computing Innovations”. The workshops were sponsored by the National Science Foundation’s new Directorate for Technology, Innovation and Partnership (TIP). TIP has a major initiative “Convergence Accelerator” that funds programs seeking to solve societal challenges through convergence research and innovation. The goal is to encourage interdisciplinary work, “merging ideas, approaches and technologies from a wide and diverse range of sectors and expertise.” The first workshop in the series was held in-person in Denver, Colorado on October 27-28th, 2022. The goal was to frame the research focus for impact areas (application domains), computing research building […]

This Wednesday, Oct 12, from 3:10pmET-4:30pmET, Barbara Grosz is giving a Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society (SRI) Seminar Series talk. Her talk is titled “Fostering responsible computing research,” and will be followed by interactive discussions in virtual breakout rooms. Grosz is the lead researcher on a recently conducted National Academies’ Computer Science and Telecommunications Board (CSTB) study on the ethical and societal impacts of computer science, and she will be presenting the major findings in the pre-publication report. CCC posted a blog earlier this summer on the CSTB report. In her talk, Grosz will outline tangible steps research institutions can take in order to be more considerate of […]