The following is a guest post from Karin Strauss from Microsoft Research and Luis Ceze from the University of Washington. The ability to automate computation has fueled the IT industry for a long time. Since the Babbage machine, our industry has been hard at work at making this process more and more efficient. But is that the only form in which computation can be useful? What about deploying computation in unfriendly environments or volumes where these machines won’t fit? Wouldn’t it be fantastic if computation can be deployed to a human body and, even more specifically, inside certain types of cells? For example, wouldn’t it be awesome to deploy computation […]

Contributions to this post were provided by Alexandra Chouldechova (Carnegie Mellon University), Sampath Kannan (University of Pennsylvania), and Aaron Roth (University of Pennsylvania).  The Computing Community Consortium held a workshop on Fair Representations and Fair Interactive Learning in 2018, which was led by Aaron Roth from University of Pennsylvania and Alexandra Chouldechova from Carnegie Mellon University. A group of 50 industry, academic, and government experts convened in Philadelphia to explore the roots of algorithmic bias. The workshop report has been highlighted on the front page of the May 2020 CACM Issue, which includes a snapshot of the report that interviewed both Roth and Chouldechova. We tend to believe that algorithmic […]

The following is a letter to the community from Margaret Martonosi Assistant Director of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Directorate of Computer & Information Science & Engineering (CISE). April 24, 2020 Dear Colleagues, The National Science Foundation (NSF) is aware of the disruption to undergraduate employment and education opportunities caused by the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic. We understand that many internships are being canceled, leaving students without expected opportunities this Summer.  The Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) previously issued a Dear Colleague Letter (DCL; NSF 20-016) expressing interest in funding supplements to active CISE awards for Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU), consistent with NSF’s REU Sites and Supplements solicitation (NSF […]

The following is a letter to the community from Micaela S. Parker, Executive Director of the Academic Data Science Alliance (ADSA). ADSA was launched in May 2019 to provide an independent national resource network for academic data science leaders, practitioners, and educators to connect and exchange ideas, and to advance the uptake of data science best practices in higher education. Dear Colleagues, The Academic Data Science Alliance is working with partners to pull together data sets and data science resources related to the COVID-19 pandemic.  Initiated by conversations with Columbia, NYU, UC Berkeley, and the University of Washington, universities in three regions of the U.S. hit hard by the coronavirus, we invite the […]

The following is a guest blog post from Ran Canetti, a professor of Computer Science at Boston University and the Director of the Center for Reliable Information System and Cyber Security. At the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) we know that everyone is dealing with a lot in these unprecedented times. We are continuing to work on behalf of the computing research community to catalyze research, but we also want to provide ways to help the community. This blog is from a series of posts about ways computing researchers are using computing to adapt and help in these times. We hope you find something that may help you, either now or in the future. In 1945, the atomic bomb brought a swift end […]

Significant contributions to this post were provided by former Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council member and current Computing Research Association (CRA) Board member Shashi Shekhar from the University of Minnesota and Computing Research Association (CRA) Board member Kate Larson from the University of Waterloo as a representative of the Info-Can/CS-CAN.  Fifty years ago on April 22, 1970, 20 million Americans, nearly 10% of the U.S. population at the time, took to the street, college campuses, and hundreds of cities to protest environmental ignorance and demand a new way forward for our planet. This first Earth Day launched a modern environmental movement to promote community action to address environmental challenges. Past […]