Last week, we shared the National Security Commission on AI‘s Interim Report as well as details about the corresponding conference held on November 6, Strength Through Innovation: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of U.S. National Security. The Commission now welcomes feedback and is looking forward to continuing to engage with the community as they move into the analysis and recommendation phase of the Commission’s work. To that end, they will be holding a series of teleconferences to provide a deeper dive into the interim report content and gather your feedback. Please join them on one of the following dates for these discussions: LOE 1: Invest in AI R&D, Thursday, November 21, […]

The following great innovative idea is from Mayank Kejriwal and Pedro Szekely from the University of Southern California. Kejriwal and Szekely were one of the Blue Sky Award winners at ISWC 2019 for their paper called Co-LOD: Continuous Space Linked Open Data. The Idea The Web has always been thought of as a collection of discrete elements; for example, the number of people with articles on Wikipedia, the number of likes for a post on Facebook, and so on. The collection of open, interlinked datasets (Linked Open Data) that forms the backbone of the Semantic Web is also discrete.  However, modern deep learning and Artificial intelligence methods operate in continuous spaces or in the realm of real numbers. […]

Hackers can use lasers to silently “speak” to any computer that receives voice commands, these include smartphones, Amazon Echo speakers, Google Homes, and Facebook’s Portal video chat devices. Former Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council member Kevin Fu, from the University of Michigan, and his collaborator Takeshi Sugawara, from the University of Tokyo, discovered that it is possible to make microphones respond to light as if it were sound.  This means that anything that acts on sound commands will act on light commands. They found that when they pointed a laser at a microphone and changed the intensity, the light would somehow perturb the microphone’s membrane at that same frequency. The […]

Significant contributions were provided by CRA Director of Government Affairs Peter Harsha and CCC Director Ann Schwartz Drobnis.   Yesterday at a conference of the National Security Commission on AI (NSCAI) in DC, a bipartisan collection of Congressional and agency leaders spoke of the urgent need for the United States to retain its leadership role in Artificial Intelligence in the face of dramatically increased competition from U.S. adversaries. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), noting Russian President Vladimir Putin’s declaration that the nation that leads AI will rule the world, affirmed the priority he believes AI research and education ought to enjoy by teasing a legislative proposal that would create a new […]

Contributions to this post were provided by CCC Chair Mark D. Hill from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and CCC Executive Committee Member Nadya Bliss from Arizona State University. The leadership of the Department of Defense (DoD) tasked the Defense Innovation Board (DIB) with proposing Artificial Intelligence (AI) Ethics Principles for DoD for the design, development, and deployment of AI for both combat and non-combat purposes.  “The mission of the DIB is to provide the Secretary of Defense, Deputy Secretary of Defense, and other senior leaders across the Department with independent advice and recommendations on innovative means to address future challenges through the prism of three focus areas: people and culture, […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) recently released the Thermodynamic Computing workshop report, the output of the CCC’s January 2019 visioning workshop of the same name. The workshop was organized by Tom Conte (Georgia Tech), Erik DeBenedictis (former Sandia National Laboratories), Natesh Ganesh (University of Massachusetts Amherst), Todd Hylton (UC San Diego), Susanne Still (University of Hawaii), John Paul Strachan (Hewlett Packard Lab HPE), R. Stanley Williams (Texas A&M). It brought together physical theorists, electrical and computer engineers, electronic/ionic device researchers, and theoretical biologists to explore a novel idea: computing as an open thermodynamic system. The report begins by explaining the need for thermodynamic computers: with the end of Moore’s Law and Dennard […]