Yesterday, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy’s National Artificial Intelligence (AI) Initiative Office launched the new AI.gov website.  This website is the home of the National AI Initiative Act of 2020 and as stated in the press release “the connection point to ongoing activities to advance U.S. leadership in AI from policy documents and strategies, to applications of AI, to the latest news and updates from the agencies and federal advisory boards helping shape the activities of the National AI Initiative.”  National AI Initiative Act of 2020 became law on January 1, 2021, providing for a coordinated program across the entire Federal government to accelerate AI research […]

Biresh Kumar Joardar began his CIFellowship in September 2020 after receiving his PhD from Washington State University in Summer of 2020. Joardar is at Duke University working with Krishnendu Chakrabarty, Distinguished Professor and Chair in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.  Current Project The theme of my current project is “Machine Learning for Machine Learning”. The project aims to demonstrate the symbiotic relationship between machine learning (ML) algorithms and computer system design. In this new paradigm, hardware researchers benefit from new data-driven ML algorithms and ML researchers benefit from efficient computing enabled by new hardware-software co-design. More specifically, I work on designing heterogeneous manycore and in-memory computing architectures with […]

Contributions to this post were provided by Elizabeth Bradley (University of Colorado Boulder), Madhav Marathe (University of Virginia), Melanie Moses (The University of New Mexico), William D. Gropp (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign), and Daniel Lopresti (Lehigh University).  We are pleased to announce the second addendum to the Computing Research Association (CRA) and Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Pandemic Informatics: Preparation, Robustness, and Resilience quadrennial paper on variants of concern (VOC).    A year ago, few experts correctly predicted the toll the pandemic has now taken, nor the extraordinarily rapid development and administration of effective vaccines. Scientists have dramatically increased understanding of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, treatment, and vaccines. Yet, where the pandemic will […]

Ibrahim Sabek began his CIFellowship in September 2020 after receiving his PhD from the University of Minnesota in January 2020. Sabek is at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) working with Michael Cafarella, Principal Research Scientist, and Tim Kraska, Associate Professor, at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Current Project My current project is exploiting machine learning models (ML) to optimize the performance of data-intensive systems, with special focus on data access and query execution modules. This includes introducing ML-optimized core data structures, such as indexes and bloom filters, and boosting the performance of main in-memory operations, such as joins and query scheduling, using statistical and deep learning techniques. […]

Cyn Liu began her CIFellowship in January 2021 after receiving her PhD from Indiana University, Bloomington in Fall of 2020. Liu is at the University of California, Irvine (UCI) working with Paul Dourish, Chancellor’s Professor of Informatics at UCI and Director of the Steckler Center for Responsible, Ethical and Accessible Technology. Current Project Responding to climate change, environmental crisis, and the global pandemic, my current research focuses on exploring, creating, deploying, and evaluating (multi-)sensory data representation models that leverage our bodily senses to raise environmental awareness, increase data literacy, and support community health initiatives. Over the past decade, the emergence of low-cost sensors, proliferation of personal devices, and expansion of wireless […]

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 […]