In May, The White House Office of Science Technology Policy, Department of Commerce and the Arnold Foundation approached the Computing Community Consortium (CCC), as a community organization of computer science researchers, to lead a conversation for law enforcement to learn about the state of the art in video analysis techniques and how they may be applicable to analyze and improve law enforcement practice. This was a timely opportunity to provide input to a burgeoning application space: police body worn cameras. The CCC brought together a panel of computer vision experts and law enforcement personnel. Their subsequent discussions resulted in the recently released Video Analysis for Body-worn Cameras in Law Enforcement whitepaper. The whitepaper […]

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 is a guest post from Christos Papadimitriou, the C. Lester Hogan Professor of EECS Computer Science Division at the University of California at Berkeley. Every summer, Berkeley’s Redwood Institute for Theoretical Neuroscience organizes a ten-day summer course on Neuroscience, bringing to Berkeley several dozen young researchers (graduate students and postdocs) from all walks of science with a serious interest in learning about Neuroscience, and especially about techniques for mining and modeling of neuroscience data. This year, the Simons Institute and the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute were, for the first time, co-organizers of this course, in order to attract more computer scientists and mathematicians to this important field. The program included one day of […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) sponsored a 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. This workshop joined a series of events organized by Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) and the IEEE Robotics & Automation Society to mark the anniversary of Shakey, the first mobile intelligent robot able to reason about its own actions. One of the invited speakers Peter Hart, who was one of the original Shakey team members, presented at the workshop on Making […]

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) Big Data to Knowledge initiative (BD2K) has announced the release of an Request for Applications (RFA) for software and methods development in biomedical big data science: “Big Data to Knowledge (BD2K) Development of Software Tools and Methods for Biomedical Big Data in Targeted Areas of High Need (U01)“. This opportunity targets three topic areas of high need for researchers working with biomedical Big Data: Data privacy is one of the fundamental challenges of our age. To take full advantage of the power of big data to drive biomedical discovery, researchers must work with data from disparate sources and with differing privacy policies and protections. How do we integrate […]

The Privacy by Design four workshop series is well underway. With two workshops completed and two to come, the community engagement is high and the interest is continuing to grow. The first workshop, State of Research and Practice, was held in early February and the report can be found here. The second workshop, Privacy Enabling Design, was held in Atlanta, GA in early May. The report has now been released and a number of key insights came out of the two day discussion: Designers lack adequate heuristics to follow when designing applications that may affect users’ privacy. Users want modular privacy for different personal relationships. Designing for trust is a good framework, […]