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 […]

“Applying AI in real-world applications requires an understanding of operational realities and human workflows – especially in healthcare applications. My colleagues and I at Johns Hopkins APL are kicking off series of virtual events to look at this more closely, beginning on 4/21 with a focus on the use of AI technology to aid with the COVID-19 pandemic.”- Ashley Llorens, Chief of the Intelligent Systems Center at APL As a precursor to the 2020 National Health Symposium, the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory is hosting a virtual event exploring Operationalizing AI in Health on April 21. Event: Operationalizing AI in Health Date: April 21, 2020 Time: 3:00pm ET – 4:30pm ET Location: […]

The following is a guest blog from Kristin Osborne, Communications Manager at Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, at the University of Washington (UW) and CCC Council member Shwetak Patel, Washington Research Foundation Entrepreneurship Endowed Professor in Computer Science and Engineering and Electrical Engineering, at UW. 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 […]

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 […]

Misinformation during a national emergency is not new. In this current health crisis, the “coronavirus pandemic is generating a tidal wave of information—some of it accurate, some not so much—that has saturated social and traditional media,” as was stated in Science Magazine last week.  The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) recently held a session at AAAS called Detecting, Combating, and Identifying Dis and Mis-information. One of the speakers was Emma Spiro (University of Washington), who spoke on Misinformation in the Context of Emergencies and Disaster Events. Rumors, defined by Spiro as a “story that is unverified at the time of communication,” are widely spread during crisis events as people seek out […]

In two weeks you are hosting 1,800 scientists, engineers, designers, and other experts at a five day conference but then the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suddenly encourages Americans to practice “social distancing” measures to prevent the further spread of COVID-19. What do you do?  You move it online.  That is what the IEEE VR conference chairs decided to do last month, led by Blair MacIntyre, a professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Interactive Computing and IEEE VR conference co-chair, and Kyle Johnsen, an associate professor in the University of Georgia’s College of Engineering, when they transitioned the IEEE VR 2020 Conference to an all-virtual event. Working non-stop […]