We live in a new world. A world where information can spread fast and without any regard to accuracy. Our challenge as individual citizens is to somehow identify the disinformation from the actual information. Kate Starbird and her team from the University of Washington spend time studying this problem and the impact disinformation can have on society. Starbird recently gave a keynote address at the National Science Foundation 2019 Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace Principal Investigator’s Meeting (SaTC PI meeting ’19) in Alexandria, VA on “Bots and Trolls” — Understanding Disinformation as Collaborative Work. As Starbird said in her talk: Disinformation is not simply false information or just about “bots” or […]

The National Science Foundation’s (NSF) new solicitation, titled National Artificial Intelligence (AI) Research Institutes: Accelerating Research, Transforming Society, and Growing the American Workforce, has a program webinar on November 7th, 2019 at 3:30-4:30 PM ET. Artificial Intelligence (AI) has advanced tremendously and today promises personalized healthcare; enhanced national security; improved transportation; and more effective education, to name just a few benefits. Increased computing power, the availability of large datasets and streaming data, and algorithmic advances in machine learning (ML) have made it possible for AI development to create new sectors of the economy and revitalize industries. Continued advancement, enabled by sustained federal investment and channeled toward issues of national importance, holds the […]

The National Science Foundation (NSF), in partnership with the National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA), Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Department of Transportation (DoT), and the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) just announced a new solicitation, titled National Artificial Intelligence (AI) Research Institutes: Accelerating Research, Transforming Society, and Growing the American Workforce, with the goal to “significantly advance research in AI and accelerate the development of transformational, AI-powered innovation by allowing researchers to focus on larger-scale, longer-term research.” The National Artificial Intelligence Research Institutes program anticipates approximately $120 million in grants next year to fund eight planning grants and up to six research institutes in order to advance AI […]

The following blog was written by Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Vice-Chair Liz Bradley from University of Colorado Boulder and CCC Chair Mark D. Hill from the University of Wisconsin Madison. Times in Artificial Intelligence are or should be changing. See Bob Dylan’s 1964 lyrics below.  Last week the New York Times published an article titled “A.I. Researchers See Danger of Haves and Have-Nots.” Modern AI research, which demands enormous computational resources, large data sets, and significant human expertise, is becoming increasingly difficult for anyone outside the large tech companies like Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook. This includes university labs—which, as the article points out, have traditionally been a wellspring of […]

The following post is from Khari Douglas, who is currently at the 2019 Heidelberg Laureate Forum in Heidelberg Germany.  Every year at the Heidelberg Laureate Forum (HLF) a hot topic, or theme, related to mathematics and computer science is chosen to be addressed by a panel of experts. At this year’s HLF the hot topic sessions, which took place on Tuesday, September 24th, focused on climate change and what we can do to tackle the problem. The sessions addressed questions like: “How can we predict the next century’s climate if we can hardly predict this weekend’s weather? Is the latest flooding or heat wave due to climate change, or not? Why […]

Recently, the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) released the completed Artificial Intelligence (AI) Roadmap, titled A 20-Year Community Roadmap for AI Research in the US! An HTML version is available here. Slides summarizing the roadmap are now available here. We encourage you to use these when sharing the community vision. This roadmap is the result of a year long effort by the CCC and over 100 members of the research community, led by Yolanda Gil (University of Southern California and President of AAAI) and Bart Selman (Cornell University and President Elect of AAAI). Comments on a draft report of this roadmap were solicited in the Spring of 2019 and incorporated in the final report. If you would like […]