The National Science Foundation (NSF) announced recently the selection of four grand prize and three meritorious prize winners for its first-ever NSF 2026 Idea Machine prize competition. One of the winners, Vincent Conitzer (Duke University), was at the second AI Roadmap workshop on Interaction in January 2019. Conitzer’s challenge is to discover models of conscious experience. See the press release below to learn more.  The NSF 2026 Idea Machine encouraged individuals from all walks of life, age 14 or older, to submit pressing “grand challenges” requiring fundamental research in science, engineering, or STEM education in order to inform NSF’s long-term planning. Approximately 800 entries were received from nearly every state […]

Yesterday, the President released his FY2021 budget request. The request includes a significant increase in nondefense AI R&D compared to the FY 2020 Budget and a commitment to double nondefense AI R&D by 2022. If enacted, it would bring spending for AI R&D and interdisciplinary research institutes at the National Science Foundation (NSF) to more than $830 million, which represents a more than 70 percent increase over the FY 2020 budget. This increase would map well to A 20-Year Community Roadmap for AI Research in the US, which was released by the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) and the computing research community in late 2019. The roadmap, led by Yolanda Gil […]

The National Academy of Engineering (NAE) has elected 87 new members and 18 foreign members. Six computing researchers are among those elected this year.  They include Joel Emer (MIT / NVIDIA) for “quantitative analysis of computer architecture and its application to architectural innovation in commercial microprocessors,” Vicki Hanson (ACM) for “contributions to the design of accessible systems, and for leadership in the computer science and engineering community,” Jim Kurose (University of Massachusetts, Amherst) for “contributions to the design and analysis of network protocols for multimedia communication,” Fei-Fei Li (Stanford University) for “contributions in building large knowledge bases for machine learning and visual understanding,” Peter Shor (MIT) for “pioneering contributions to quantum computation,” and Russ Taylor […]

On May 10, 1950, President Truman signed the National Science Foundation Act, creating the only federal agency charged with funding fundamental research and education across all fields of science and engineering. To begin a yearlong commemoration of NSF’s 70th anniversary as well as the 75 years since the seminal publication of Vannevar Bush’s “Science – the Endless Frontier,” NSF is holding a public two-day symposium at NSF headquarters on Feb. 6-7, 2020. These significant anniversaries present an opportunity to spotlight the importance of basic research and the longstanding federal contribution to science, technology and innovation. The symposium will feature many engaging speakers who will address NSF’s past, present and future. The symposium […]

The following great innovative idea is from Yiqun Xie, who is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Minnesota.  Xie along with his advisor and former Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council member McKnight Distinguished Professor Shashi Shekhar, Professor Richard Feiock of Florida State University and Professor Joseph Knight from the Department of Forestry Resources at the University of Minnesota, received a Blue Sky Idea Award at the 27th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems. They were honored for their paper, “Revolutionizing Tree Management via Innovative Spatial Techniques.” The Idea Unawareness of tree locations and their spatial relationships with urban infrastructures have disturbed our communities with increasing frequency, scale and severity. For example, Emerald Ash Borer […]

On any given day, tens of millions of people find themselves trapped in instances of modern slavery. The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is organizing a visioning workshop, in collaboration with Code 8.7, on March 3-4th, 2020 in Washington, DC that will bring together members of the computing research community along with anti-slavery practitioners and survivors to lay out a research roadmap aimed at applying AI to the fight against human trafficking. Building on the kickoff Code 8.7 conference held at the UN in February 2019, the focus for this event will be to link the ambitious goals outlined in the 20-Year Community Roadmap for AI Research to challenges vital in […]