Contributions to this post were provided by Elizabeth Bradley (University of Colorado Boulder), Madhav Marathe (University of Virginia), Melanie Moses (The University of New Mexico), William D Gropp (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign), and Daniel Lopresti (Lehigh University).  In Fall 2020, the Computing Research Association (CRA) released a series of planned white papers produced through its subcommittees (including the Computing Community Consortium (CCC)), exploring areas and issues around computing research with the potential to address national priorities over the next four years. Called Quadrennial Papers, the white papers attempt to portray a broad picture of computing research detailing potential research directions, challenges, and recommendations for policymakers and the computing research community.  […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is excited to announce the new website feature, “CIFellows Spotlight”, which will highlight the work of the Computing Innovation Fellows (CIFellows) going forward. Announced in May 2020, the CIFellows program was created, with strong support from NSF,  to provide recent PhD graduates in computing research with the opportunity to continue their work despite the hiring disruptions in academic institutions due to COVID-19. These articles will give the CIFellows the opportunity to share their work with the community and dive deeper into the details of their current project(s). Yi Ding began her CIFellowship in January 2021 after receiving her PhD from University of Chicago this past […]

The Biden administration today appointed Stefanie Tompkins to run the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) as its 23rd Director. DARPA is a $3.5 billion a year research and development agency of the United States Department of Defense, whose mission is to make pivotal investments in breakthrough technologies for national security. From the press release:  “With nearly eleven years of DARPA service under her belt, Tompkins, a former military intelligence officer in the U.S. Army, has an exceptional understanding of the agency’s culture. From 2007 through 2017, she held multiple positions, including program manager and deputy director of the Strategic Technology Office, a systems-oriented technical office; DARPA chief of staff; […]

The following Great Innovative Idea is from Yaron Kanza (AT&T Labs-Research), David Gibbon (AT&T Labs-Research), Divesh Srivastava (AT&T Labs-Research), Valerie Yip (AT&T Labs-Research), and Eric Zavesky (AT&T Labs-Research). The team’s paper, Smartmedia: Locally & Contextually-Adapted Streaming Media, won first-place in the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) sponsored Blue Sky Ideas Track Competition at the 28th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems.  The Idea Streaming media is gaining popularity, with numerous new services for video on demand and live broadcast. Often, streaming media is consumed on mobile devices, like smartphones and tablets, in different locations and contexts. In the novel approach we present, named Smartmedia, the streamed content […]

Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council Member, Professor of Computer Science at the University of New Mexico and External Faculty Member at the Santa Fe Institute, Melanie E. Moses, recently published an article in Nautilus titled, “How to Fix the Vaccine Rollout: A computational biologist charts a fair and efficient course for vaccine distribution.” A year after the onset of COVID-19, the development and approval of vaccines provides hope that the pandemic nightmare is nearing an end. With countries facing second or third waves and, in many places, cases hitting an all time high, vaccinating our most vulnerable populations as quickly as possible is essential. Unfortunately, until now, the vaccine rollout […]

On March 3-4 from 12:00 PM to 5:00 PM ET, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) will convene “Assessing and Improving AI Trustworthiness: Current Contexts, Potential Paths,” a public workshop sponsored by the National Institute of Standards and Technology to help think through this interrelated set of challenges. This workshop will work to produce initial ideas for activities and collaborations by academia, industry, and the public sector to improve the assessment of trustworthiness of AI systems, and recommendations for NIST and similar public bodies. The notion of AI trustworthiness, comprising a wide array of attributes such as robustness, accuracy, fairness, explainability, and privacy, presents a complicated set […]