The following is a special contribution to this blog by CCC Executive Council Member Mark D. Hill of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Full disclosure: He had the pleasure of working with one of the authors of the discussed paper—Sarita Adve—on her 1993 Ph.D. Great conundrums include: * Will I drink coffee or tea? * Shall I have cake or ice cream? * Should I use a cache or scratchpad? While most readers will not face the last choice, it is important for saving time and energy in the devices we love by keeping frequently-used information close at hand. Caches are the workhorse of modern computers, feeding the processor with data […]

Texas A&M University‘s Raytheon Professor of Computer Science and Engineering and former Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council Member, Robin Murphy recently gave a TED talk on Disaster Robots. Robots don’t replace people or dogs…They do things new. They assist the responders, the experts, in new and innovative ways. Robin Murphy, explains how if you can reduce the initial emergency response by one day, you can reduce the overall recovery by 1000 days. If the initial responders can get in, save lives… that means the other groups can get in to restore the water, the roads, the electricity, which means then the construction people, the insurance agents, all of them can get in to rebuild […]

  The following Great Innovative Idea is from Sergey Levine, Chelsea Finn, Trevor Darrell, and Pieter Abbeel in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences (EECS) Department at the University of California Berkeley. Their End-to-End Training of Deep Visuomotor Policies paper was one of the winners at the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) sponsored Blue Sky Ideas Track Competition at the AAAI-RSS Special Workshop on the 50th Anniversary of Shakey: The Role of AI to Harmonize Robots and Humans in Rome, Italy. It was a half day workshop on July 16th during the Robotics Science and Systems (RSS) 2015 Conference. The Innovative Idea Techniques like reinforcement learning and optimal control offer the promise of automating robotic decision making by using […]

The National Institute of Health (NIH) supported center for physics-based Simulation of Biological Structures (Simbios) at Stanford University has developed OpenSim, a free software tool that can model and simulate movement of humans and animals.

The CCC Computer-Aided Personalized Education (CAPE) Workshop will be held in Washington, DC on November 12-13th. The demand for education in STEM fields is exploding, and universities and colleges are straining to satisfy this demand. In the case of Computer Science, for example, the number of US students enrolled in introductory courses has grown three-fold in the past decade. Recently massive open online courses (MOOCs) have been promoted as a way to ease this strain, but scaling traditional models of teaching to MOOCs poses many of the same challenges observed in the overflowing classrooms, namely, assessment of students’ knowledge and providing meaningful feedback to individual students. To tackle these problems […]

In case you missed it, Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council member Cynthia Dwork, distinguished scientist at Microsoft Research, and her co-authors Vitaly Feldman, research scientist at IBM’s Almaden Research Center; Moritz Hardt, research scientist at Google; Toniann Pitassi, professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto; Omer Reingold, principle researcher at Samsung Research America; and Aaron Roth, the Raj and Neera Singh Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer and Information Science in the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Engineering and Applied Science published an article in Science on The reusable holdout: Preserving validity in adaptive data analysis. In their paper they demonstrate a new approach for addressing the challenges […]