National Library of Medicine Director Patti Brennan spoke at the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Leadership in Science Policy Institute (LiSPI) this morning and strongly urged computer scientists to respond to this Request for Information (RFI) to Help Shape the Future of Data Science!  The deadline has been extended to November 20th, 2017! On behalf of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Library of Medicine (NLM) seeks community input on new data science research initiatives that could address key challenges currently faced by researchers, clinicians, administrators, and others, in all areas of biomedical, social/behavioral and health-related research. The field of data science is broad in scope, encompassing approaches for […]

CCC Chair Beth Mynatt has contributed to this blog. As computing has grown even more essential to day to day life, the capacity of computing research to effect societal change and address the needs of society has subsequently increased. In convening the Computing Research Symposium, our goal was to grow awareness and enthusiasm for the role that computing research plays in addressing timely and critical societal needs. How can we use artificial intelligence to amplify human abilities? How can intelligent infrastructure strengthen our communities? How do security and privacy promote democracy? How can big data and algorithms ensure fairness? To help answer these questions and more, we held the second […]

The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) is pleased to present the 2017 Fall Symposium Series, to be held Thursday through Saturday, November 9-11, at the Westin Arlington Gateway in Arlington, Virginia. One of the symposia is on Cognitive Assistance in Government and Public Sector Applications. Cognitive Assistance is an important focus area for AI. While it has several facets and still lacks a precise definition (one of the reasons for this Symposium!), it has been called Augmented Intelligence, the automation of knowledge work, intelligence amplification, cognitive prostheses, and cognitive analytics in the past. It is generally agreed that even while fully automated AI is still being developed, there […]

The National Science Foundation (NSF) recently announced $17.7 million in funding for 12 Transdisciplinary Research in Principles of Data Science (TRIPODS) projects, which will bring together the statistics, mathematics and theoretical computer science communities to develop the foundations of data science. Technological advances and unprecedented access to computing infrastructure have resulted in an explosion of data from different sources. The availability of these data — their volume and variety, and the speed at which they are collected — is transforming research in all fields of science and engineering. TRIPODS awards will enable data-driven discovery through major investments in state-of-the-art mathematical and statistical tools, better data mining and machine learning approaches, […]

Are you helping organize a conference in the near future? Consider having a Blue Sky Ideas Conference Track!  The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) sponsors an initiative to bring special “Blue Sky Ideas” tracks to leading computer science research conferences. The goal of this initiative is to help conferences reach out beyond the usual research papers that present completed work and to seek out papers that present ideas and visions that can stimulate the research community to pursue new directions. Conferences may request CCC sponsorship of such tracks along with a CCC grant that provides prize money for the top 3 papers (first prize $1000, second prize $750, and third prize $500), to be awarded […]

Recently, the National Science Foundation (NSF) has been looking to highlight the value of convergence. The deep integration of multiple disciplines in order to advance scientific discovery and innovation. As a result, they have announced their first set of convergence awards. The 23 newly awarded projects will foster convergence to address grand challenges in the context of five of NSF’s “10 Big Ideas for Future NSF Investments,” a set of cutting-edge research agendas uniquely suited for NSF’s broad portfolio of investments. One of these five ideas is work in the human technology frontier space. This is also, quintessentially, one of the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) 2017-2018 task forces. The Human Technology Frontier task force focuses on the […]