Melanie Mitchell, Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council member and Professor at the  Santa Fe Institute and Portland State University was recently interviewed on the Medscape podcast, Medicine and the Machine in an episode titled ‘Can AI Exist in Medicine Without Human Oversight?. The podcast, led by Medscape editor-in-chief Eric Topol and Abraham Verghese from Stanford, explores critical questions and discussions on artificial intelligence’s (AI) impact on modern medicine. While it was acknowledged that AI has made great strides in the past decade on accomplishing narrow tasks, the episode highlights that the technology still lacks the ability to work autonomously in the field of medicine. Making this a possibility would require […]

The following is a guest blog post by the Computing Research Association (CRA) Government Affairs Director, Peter Harsha. It was originally posted on CRA’s Computing Research Policy Blog.  President-elect Joe Biden announced today he intends to nominate Dr. Eric Lander, biologist and former leader of the Human Genome Project, to lead the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and serve as the Presidential Science Advisor. Biden also announced that he was designating the Presidential Science Advisor a cabinet level position for the first time in history, illustrating the importance the new administration will place on the guidance of science in policymaking. Also named today as Deputy Director of OSTP is Dr. Alondra Nelson, who is […]

The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) recently named 95 of its members as the new ACM Fellows for 2020.    One of the newly named members is former Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council member Maja Matarić, University of Southern California, for her “contributions to socially assistive robotics and human-robot systems.” Matarić was a key contributor to the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Roadmap, A 20-Year Community Roadmap for AI Research in the US, which was released in August 2019.  Several other individuals involved with the Computing Research Association (CRA) and Computing Research Association – Widening Participation (CRA-WP) have been named Fellows. See the CRA Bulletin for the full list.  Additional information about the […]

Contributions to this post were provided by CCC Council member Maria Gini. Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council member and Distinguished Professor of the College of Science and Engineering at the University of Minnesota, Maria Gini was recently featured in an article highlighting the work of U of M’s Minnesota Robotics Institute (MnRI).   The Minnesota Robotics Institute is a unit of U of M’s College of Science and Engineering Department that brings together students and researchers from all over the world to pursue an education in robotics. The article highlighted a couple of ongoing and past projects that have come out of the institute including a robot used to detect autism in […]

The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) just announced its 2020 Fellows! The honor recognizes diverse accomplishments, including pioneering research, leadership within a given field, teaching and mentoring, fostering collaborations and advancing public understanding of science.  Among the 2020 Fellows is Yolanda Gil from the University of Southern California. Gil, along with Bart Selman (Cornell University), chaired a year long effort by the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) to produce a roadmap for Artificial Intelligence (AI). Over 100 members of the research community participated in three workshops. One of those workshops was chaired by another new fellow, Daniel S. Weld (University of Washington). The completed AI Roadmap, titled A […]

Nadya Bliss, Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Executive Council member and Executive Director of the Global Security Initiative (GSI), was recently interviewed by her local CBS affiliate station on tracking how misinformation and disinformation spreads on social media and why, in recent years, it is spreading more rapidly.  “Around events that are changing really rapidly, the information ecosystem is particularly sensitive to all kinds of noise. Whether it’s misinformation without intent or disinformation with intent,” Bliss said. “It’s very difficult for an individual to be able to parse everything and we’re very susceptible. We’re in this moment where we are consistently checking, which makes us more vulnerable. False information tends to spread […]