The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is excited to announce the new website feature, “CIFellows Spotlight”, which will highlight the work of the Computing Innovation Fellows (CIFellows) going forward. Announced in May 2020, the CIFellows program was created, with strong support from NSF,  to provide recent PhD graduates in computing research with the opportunity to continue their work despite the hiring disruptions in academic institutions due to COVID-19. These articles will give the CIFellows the opportunity to share their work with the community and dive deeper into the details of their current project(s). Yi Ding began her CIFellowship in January 2021 after receiving her PhD from University of Chicago this past […]

The Biden administration today appointed Stefanie Tompkins to run the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) as its 23rd Director. DARPA is a $3.5 billion a year research and development agency of the United States Department of Defense, whose mission is to make pivotal investments in breakthrough technologies for national security. From the press release:  “With nearly eleven years of DARPA service under her belt, Tompkins, a former military intelligence officer in the U.S. Army, has an exceptional understanding of the agency’s culture. From 2007 through 2017, she held multiple positions, including program manager and deputy director of the Strategic Technology Office, a systems-oriented technical office; DARPA chief of staff; […]

Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council Member, Professor of Computer Science at the University of New Mexico and External Faculty Member at the Santa Fe Institute, Melanie E. Moses, recently published an article in Nautilus titled, “How to Fix the Vaccine Rollout: A computational biologist charts a fair and efficient course for vaccine distribution.” A year after the onset of COVID-19, the development and approval of vaccines provides hope that the pandemic nightmare is nearing an end. With countries facing second or third waves and, in many places, cases hitting an all time high, vaccinating our most vulnerable populations as quickly as possible is essential. Unfortunately, until now, the vaccine rollout […]

On March 3-4 from 12:00 PM to 5:00 PM ET, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) will convene “Assessing and Improving AI Trustworthiness: Current Contexts, Potential Paths,” a public workshop sponsored by the National Institute of Standards and Technology to help think through this interrelated set of challenges. This workshop will work to produce initial ideas for activities and collaborations by academia, industry, and the public sector to improve the assessment of trustworthiness of AI systems, and recommendations for NIST and similar public bodies. The notion of AI trustworthiness, comprising a wide array of attributes such as robustness, accuracy, fairness, explainability, and privacy, presents a complicated set […]

Contributions to this post were provided by CCC Vice Chair Daniel Lopresti.  AI for Good Global Summit hosted a webinar on AI to Prevent Modern Slavery, Human Trafficking and Forced and Child Labour today and featured Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Executive Council Member Nadya Bliss (Executive Director of the Global Security Initiative at Arizona State University) as well as Alice Eckstein (Programme Manager, Modern Slavery Programme at United Nations University – Centre for Policy Research), Doreen Boyd (Professor of Earth Observation, Faculty of Social Sciences at University of Nottingham), James Goulding (Deputy Director N/LAB, Faculty of Social Sciences at University of Nottingham) and Anjali Mazumder (Thematic Lead on AI, Justice […]

An increasing number of National Science Foundation (NSF) Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) solicitations, including the CISE Core Programs (for which SMALL Projects do not have a submission deadline), are eligible for cloud access via the CloudBank portal to the AWS, Azure, GCP, and IBM clouds. These clouds offer enormous capacity and rich software stacks. Another plus: access through CloudBank is not subject to indirect cost. For further information: An AWS Public Sector Blog post by Deep Medhi (NSF) and Sanjay Padhi (AWS): https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/publicsector/simplifying-access-cloud-resources-researchers-cloudbank/ A webinar featuring Deep Medhi, Sanjay Padhi, and Mike Norman (UCSD; PI of NSF’s CloudBank effort): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtdhxFOrIcM&feature=youtu.be CloudBank: https://www.cloudbank.org/ July 2018 workshop report “Enabling […]