The following is a guest blog post by Beth Mynatt, Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Vice Chair and professor of Interactive Computing and the executive director of Georgia Tech‘s Institute for People and Technology (IPaT).  I had the opportunity to attend President Obama’s White House announcement of his “Precision Medicine Initiative” last Friday. The president was introduced by Elana Simon, a computer science major at Harvard University, who has conducted cancer research and was diagnosed with a rare form of liver cancer as a teenager. Obama’s $215 million request, included in his fiscal 2016 budget, would go toward research by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the NIH’s National Cancer Institute and the […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) sponsored another track in its Blue Sky Ideas Conference Track series 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 purpose of this conference was to promote research in artificial intelligence (AI) and scientific exchange among AI researchers, practitioners, scientists, and engineers in affiliated disciplines. The goal of this track was to present ideas and visions that can stimulate the research community to pursue new directions, such as new problems, new application domains, or new methodologies. The winning papers were: Machine Teaching: an Inverse Problem to Machine Learning and an Approach Toward Optimal Education Xiaojin Zhu (Department of Computer Sciences, […]

The following is a guest blog post by Tom Dietterich, current president for The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) and Eric Horvitz, former president of AAAI. The first winter AAAI meeting is occurring now in Austin, Texas until Friday, January 30, 2015.  Discussions about Artificial Intelligence (AI) have jumped into the public eye over the past year, with several luminaries speaking publicly about the threat of AI to the future of humanity.   Over the last several decades, AI — computing methods for automated perception, learning, understanding, and reasoning — have become commonplace in our lives. We plan trips using GPS systems that rely on AI to cut through the complexity of millions […]

A few weeks ago, The Wall Street Journal posted the article, “The Tech That Will Change Your Life in 2015: Gadgets and Ideas With the Best Chance of Making an Impact … and What You Can Do to Prepare for Them.” It offered predictions on cutting edge tech trends for the new year. Here are some of the highlights: Windows 10: Scheduled for release in the fall “The beloved Start menu is resurrected and modernized, and multiple virtual desktops will improve multitasking.…you may want to wait for the great assortment of new Windows 10 PCs that will appear in late 2015.” Apple Watch: Debuting in the coming months “It will undoubtedly […]

The new class of Fellows for TED2015 has recently been released, and among the 21 “game-changing thinkers” are Laura Boykin, a biologist and Jonathan Home, a physicist. We’ve chosen to highlight them here because even though they have very different backgrounds and goals, both use advanced computing techniques to transform the world.   Laura is a biologist who uses genomics and supercomputing to tackle food security in sub-Saharan Africa. She’s especially interested in figuring out what to do about whiteflies, which are devastating local cassava crops, a staple food in many countries.       Jonathan is a physicist working to build a quantum computer, attempting to achieve high-precision control of […]

The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is out with its 2014 Fellows, 47 of its members from universities, corporations, and research labs being recognized “for their contributions to computing that are driving innovations across multiple domains and disciplines…including database mining and design; artificial intelligence and machine learning; cryptography and verification; Internet security and privacy; computer vision and medical imaging; electronic design automation; and human-computer interaction.” They join a distinguished set of colleagues honored since 1993. Check out 2014 Fellows, including our own Computing Community Consortium (CCC) council member Daniela Rus! Samson Abramsky University of Oxford For contributions to domains in logical form, game semantics, categorical quantum mechanics and contextual semantics Leslie Lamport Microsoft Research For […]