The following Great Innovative Idea is from Michela Milano at the University of Bologna-Italy and Pascal Van Hentenryck from NICTA Optimisation Research Group and the University of Michigan. Their Emerging Architectures for Global System Science paper was one of the winners at the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) sponsored Blue Sky Ideas Conference Track at the 29th Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-15), January 25-30, 2015 in Austin, Texas. The Innovative Idea Our society is organized around a number of (interdependent) global systems: Logistic and supply chains, health services, energy networks, financial markets, computer networks, and cities. Typically, people optimize these systems by considering sub-systems in isolation and ignoring aspects that cannot be modelled easily such […]

The following Great Innovative Idea is from Marc Palyart at the University of British Columbia, Gail C. Murphy at the Univeristy of British Columbia, Emerson Murphy-Hill at NC State University, and Xavier Blanc at Bordeaux University. Their Speculative Reprogramming paper won third place at the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) sponsored Blue Sky Ideas Conference Track series at the 22nd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE), November 16-22, 2014 in Hong Kong. The Innovative Idea Software programming today is largely a flat-line activity.  Although a software developer implementing a design makes many choices, such as which library to use, which data structures to use and so on, these choices are seldom captured; the code committed to the repository is typically the final end choice. To support programming as […]

The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) currently has a three month Technovisual: Art in the Age of Code exhibit on display at their headquarters in Washington, D.C. The exhibit showcases eight artists from across the U.S. who use computer programming and the science of computing to create new experiences and ask new questions. Artists, as intellectual pioneers, have embraced the unique aesthetic and creative possibilities of computing since the dawn of the Information Age and increasingly apply digital tools with the same fluency as physical ones. Please join the AAAS Arts Program tomorrow night, July 9th, from 6:30-8:30pm at AAAS for a “Coding and Creativity” panel discussion. Participants will discuss […]

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 as travel grants. Papers in a “Blue Sky Ideas” track should be open-ended, possibly “outrageous” or […]

The 2015 Microsoft Research Faculty Summit will be streamed live from Redmond, Washington on Wednesday, July 8 and Thursday, July 9. This free online event offers keynotes and selected presentations from the Faculty Summit on future trends in computer science research. This year’s event, which focuses on Artificial Intelligence, includes former Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council Member and now Microsoft Research Managing Director, Eric Horvitz. Eric recently posted a CCC blog post on the Benefits and Risks of Artificial Intelligence. The Summit will feature three keynote speakers and a panel: July 8: Opening Keynote 8:30–9:15 A.M. PT (11:30 A.M.–12:15 P.M. ET): Jeannette Wing, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Research Panel: Progress in AI: Myths, Realities […]

On June 2, our new CCC Council member starting July 1st, Kevin Fu (Associate Professor, Sloan Research Fellow Computer Science and Engineering Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Michigan) was one of the five witnesses to testify to the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs at a hearing on “The IRS Data Break: Steps to Protect Americans’ Personal Information.” Fu recommend the following to the committee: Encourage research collaboration between cybersecurity experts and social and behavioral science to carry out human subjects experiments that measure the risks and benefits of knowledge-based authentication. A transcript of Fu’s oral testimony is here.  Visuals are here. A list of all the witnesses and their […]