The following Great Innovative Idea is from Laura Major, the Vice President of Engineering at CyPhy Works. Major was one of the Blue Sky Award winners at the International Symposium on Robotics Research (ISRR 17) in Puerto Varas, Chile for her paper, Autonomous Agents in the Wild: Human Interaction Challenges.  The Idea Autonomy is moving into commercial applications, where it is being encountered by untrained, unfamiliar consumers. These individuals, with little exposure to autonomy or its principles, will be using advanced automation to perform safety-critical tasks such as driving their cars or flying video-capture drones. While advanced automation has been applied in industrial applications for decades, with experts using it to monitor and control highly […]

The AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellows at the National Science Foundation (NSF) have organized another webinar in their Data Science Seminar Series from Stan Ahalt on Tools for data, science, scientists and reasoning machines. The webinar will be tomorrow, Tuesday, February 6, 2018, from 2:00PM-3:00PM ET. Stan Ahalt is director of the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He leads a team of research scientists, software and network engineers, data science specialists and visualization experts who work closely with faculty research teams at UNC, Duke, NC State and with partners across the country. RENCI’s role is to provide enabling cyberinfrastructure to these research collaborations, which often means working on the challenges of […]

Professor Stefan Savage of the University of California, San Diego will present “Modern Automotive Vulnerabilities: Problems, Causes, and Outcomes,” part of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Computer & Information Science & Engineering (CISE) Distinguished Lecture series on February 8, 2018, from 2:00PM to 3:00PM ET. Stefan Savage is a professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of California, San Diego. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Washington and a B.S. in Applied History from Carnegie Mellon University. Savage is a full-time empiricist, whose research interests lie at the intersection of computer security, distributed systems and networking.  He currently serves as co-director of UCSD’s Center […]

For weeks we have been recapping the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Symposium from the perspective of the researchers and industry representatives who presented their work on each panel. This week, we are getting a different perspective. The goal of the final panel, called Connecting Computing Research with National Priorities and moderated by CCC Vice Chair Mark D. Hill, was to get a perspective from people who have or are currently serving in government. The panelists included: Will Barkis, from Orange Silicon Valley, shared a Silicon Valley perspective and called for increasing investment in basic research and development to benefit society as well as support innovation in industry. He emphasized that collaboration […]

The terms superposition, entanglement, and interference might sound like they are from a superhero movie, but they are in fact very important terms in the field of quantum computing. Quantum computing is very different from classical digital on/off computing, which you might be more familiar with. It relies on the principles of quantum mechanics to compute and uses these terms to store information in a quantum state. Recently, the Microsoft Research Podcast interviewed Microsoft Principal Research Manager, Dr. Krysta Svore about her field of quantum computing. In the podcast, Svore talks about how quantum computing can do so much more than digital computing. With quantum algorithms we can “solve real […]

Contributions to this post were provided by CCC Council member Nadya Bliss, Solon Barocas, Nick Diakopoulos, and Kelly Jin. Every few weeks we have been highlighting different panels from the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Symposium on Computing Research: Addressing National Priorities and Societal Needs. This week we are looking at the Data, Algorithms, and Fairness panel. This panel looked at how data-driven and algorithmic decision-making increasingly determines how businesses target advertisements to consumers, how police departments monitor individuals or groups, how banks decide who gets a loan and who does not, how employers hire, how colleges and universities make admissions and financial aid decisions, and much more. As data-driven decisions […]