The Computing Research Association (CRA) and Computing Community Consortium (CCC) are pleased to announce a new Computing Innovation Fellows (CIFellows) Program for 2020. This program recognizes the significant disruption to the academic job search caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and associated economic uncertainty and aims to provide a career-enhancing bridge experience for recent and soon-to-be PhD graduates in computing.  The goal of the program is to create career growth opportunities that support maintaining the computing research pipeline. Computing research is defined as any area included under the National Science Foundation (NSF) Computing and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Directorate. This effort takes inspiration from CRA/CCC’s NSF-funded Computing Innovation Fellows Programs […]

The following is a guest blog from CCC Chair Mark D. Hill.  In these troubled times of COVID-19, it is especially helpful to remember a joie de vivre. The Women of (Computer Science) Theory (WIT) convincingly demonstrate this—together but with appropriate social distance—in WIT Presents – I Will Survive (3 minutes). Several performers have connections with the Computing Research Association (CRA) and the Computing Community Consortium (CCC), including CCC Council member Ronitt Rubinfeld (MIT) and former CCC Council member Tal Rabin (Algorand Foundation). Rebecca Wright (Barnard College) is on the CRA-Widening Participation Board of Directors, Shuchi Chawla (University of Wisconsin Madison) attended the CCC Theoretical Foundations for Social Computing in 2015, […]

The following is an upcoming webinar on how AI is being used in the fight against COVID-19, hosted by NSF, Axios, and the British Embassy. Artificial Intelligence is poised to transform the modern world. In the short term, AI is being deployed like never before to combat COVID-19 as governments, businesses, and health organizations leverage the technology in unprecedented ways to respond to the pandemic. In the long term, AI will represent a step change for the economy, how we live and work, and society at large. If widely adopted, AI could add $330 billion to the UK economy alone by 2030 as it optimizes existing sectors and generates entirely […]

About a month ago, at the beginning of this pandemic, the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) blogged about Running a Virtual Conference and highlighted Blair MacIntyre, a professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Interactive Computing and IEEE VR conference co-chair, and Kyle Johnsen, an associate professor in the University of Georgia’s College of Engineering, when they transitioned the IEEE VR 2020 Conference to an all-virtual event. See that blog here. Since then, the research community has started to adjust to this new normal and transition to virtual conferences. This includes the ACM Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS 2020), which was also held online in March. […]

In March 2020, the National Science Foundation (NSF) announced the first ten recipients of the NSF Program on Fairness in Artificial Intelligence in Collaboration with Amazon (FAI).  From the solicitation: NSF and Amazon are partnering to jointly support computational research focused on fairness in AI, with the goal of contributing to trustworthy AI systems that are readily accepted and deployed to tackle grand challenges facing society. Specific topics of interest include, but are not limited to transparency, explainability, accountability, potential adverse biases and effects, mitigation strategies, algorithmic advances, fairness objectives, validation of fairness, and advances in broad accessibility and utility. Funded projects will enable broadened acceptance of AI systems, helping […]

The following is a guest post from Karin Strauss from Microsoft Research and Luis Ceze from the University of Washington. The ability to automate computation has fueled the IT industry for a long time. Since the Babbage machine, our industry has been hard at work at making this process more and more efficient. But is that the only form in which computation can be useful? What about deploying computation in unfriendly environments or volumes where these machines won’t fit? Wouldn’t it be fantastic if computation can be deployed to a human body and, even more specifically, inside certain types of cells? For example, wouldn’t it be awesome to deploy computation […]