While wearable computing might seem like a new thing, it has been a part of our imagination since 1945 when Vannevar Bush headed the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development and envisioned the head-mounted camera that a scientist could wear while doing experiments. This example and others were given by plenary speaker and Contextual Computing Group Professor Thad Starner from Georgia Tech at the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Symposium on Computing Research: Addressing National Priorities and Societal Needs. Microdisplays, networking, and sensing all came together in 2010 and suddenly the field of wearable computing was no longer imaginary but real. The CCC Symposium was held on October 23-24, 2017 in Washington, […]

The following blog post was drafted by CCC Chair Beth Mynatt, CCC Exec Member Ben Zorn, and CCC Council Members Elizabeth Bradley, Sampath Kannan, and Cynthia Dwork. Beth Mynatt, CCC Chair, recently submitted the following letter to the Editor of the New York Times: In her November 14th Op-Ed, Cathy O’Neil makes the case that technology is impacting people’s lives at an accelerating pace and that computer scientists have been “asleep at the wheel” in dealing with emerging challenges. Computing research advances have had sweeping societal effects, but not without problems (e.g. racial bias in facial recognition). Careful design is critical to heading off “unintended consequences” resulting from one-sided research […]

TIME’s 25 best inventions of 2017 are a mixture of fun little gadgets like the fidget spinner, a DIY cooking companion called Tasty One Top, and delicious treats like Halo Top ice cream. What is surprising, however, is that most of the inventions from the list this year are either a product of computer science research or have been greatly influenced by it. Here are some examples: Jibo – A robot that “experiences the world and reacts with expressive movements and responses.” While that technology may seem merely amusing (or creepy), it could as TIME points out be fundamentally reshaping the way we interact with machines. eSight 3– A powerful pair of glasses that […]

Contributions to this post were provided by CCC Chair Beth Mynatt, CCC Executive Council Member Daniel Lopresti, and the participants from the Intelligent Infrastructure for our Cities and Communities Panel.  Recently the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) posted an overview blog about our recent 2017 Symposium on Addressing National Priorities and Societal Needs. Over the next few weeks, we will highlight each panel session on the blog. This week we are highlighting the Intelligent Infrastructure for Our Cities and Communities Panel. The plenary speaker, Director of the National Incident Management Systems and Advanced Technologies (NIMSAT) Institute Michael Dunaway from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, presented on the Blueprint for Current […]

The following Great Innovative Idea is from Da Yan, an assistant professor in the Department of Computer and Information Sciences (CIS) at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB). Yan presented his poster, Big Data Frameworks: Bridging High Performance of HPC Community with Programming Friendliness of Data Science Community, at the CCC Symposium on Computing Research, October 23-24, 2017. The Idea Existing Big Data frameworks such as Hadoop, Spark and Google’s Pregel emphasize on programming simplicity, where a distributed algorithm can be written with just a few lines of code. However, they only target data-intensive analytics, where the workloads are mainly generated by data volume, and network communication is the performance bottleneck. For compute-intensive tasks where the […]

The speaker and poster videos from the 2017 Computing Research Symposium on Addressing National Priorities and Societal Needs are now available!  The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) has hosted dozens of research visioning workshops to imagine, discuss, and debate the future of computing and its role in addressing societal needs. The second CCC Computing Research Symposium brought these topics into a program designed to illuminate current and future trends in computing and the potential for computing to address national challenges. See the videos from the Symposium here. Poster presenters at the Symposium included early career faculty members, post-docs, and graduate students from many fields of computer science. There were a total of […]