The following blog is from the ACM Bulletin on March 18, 2020.  ACM has named Patrick M. (Pat) Hanrahan and Edwin E. (Ed) Catmull recipients of the 2019 ACM A.M. Turing Award for fundamental contributions to 3-D computer graphics, and the revolutionary impact of these techniques on computer-generated imagery (CGI) in filmmaking and other applications. Ed Catmull and Pat Hanrahan have fundamentally influenced the field of computer graphics through conceptual innovation and contributions to both software and hardware. Their work has had a revolutionary impact on filmmaking, leading to a new genre of entirely computer-animated feature films beginning 25 years ago with Toy Story and continuing to the present day. Catmull is a computer […]

The following is a Dear Colleague Letter from National Science Foundation (NSF) Director France A. Córdova. It is critically important for the computing research community to respond to this opportunity insofar as possible and to hopefully help inform and educate about the science of virus transmission. Dear Colleague,  In light of the emergence and spread of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in the United States and abroad, the National Science Foundation (NSF) is accepting proposals to conduct non-medical, non-clinical-care research that can be used immediately to explore how to model and understand the spread of COVID-19, to inform and educate about the science of virus transmission and prevention, and to […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) recently sponsored a Blue Sky Ideas Conference Track at the Thirty-Fourth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, February 7-12, 2020 in New York, NY. The Blue Sky Ideas talk presentations were aimed at presenting ideas and visions that can stimulate the research community to pursue new directions, e.g., new problems, new application domains, or new methodologies that are likely to stimulate significant new research. First Place- Back to the Future for Dialogue Research (Phil Cohen) Second Place– AI for Explaining Decisions in Multi-Agent Environments (Sarit Kraus, Amos Azaria, Jelena Fiosina, Maike Greve, Noam Hazon, Lutz Kolbe, Tim-Benjamin Lembcke, Joerg P. Mueller, Soeren Schleibaum and Mark Vollrath) Third Place– Unveiling Hidden […]

The National Cancer Institute (NCI) in collaboration with Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), and Knowinnovation (KI) are convening experts in cancer systems biology, mathematical modeling and machine learning (and related artificial intelligence expertise) to come together, share ideas, form new collaborative teams, and propose and refine interdisciplinary pilot projects. The Innovation Lab “Advancing Cancer Biology at the Frontiers of Machine Learning and Mechanistic Modeling” will be held on June 1-5, 2020. Applications are due here on March 20, 2020. Summary of the Opportunity The cancer research field has benefited from both data-driven models (machine learning, including deep learning, for example) and mechanistic models (those commonly employed in systems biology)). While machine […]

The National Science Foundation (NSF) announced recently the selection of four grand prize and three meritorious prize winners for its first-ever NSF 2026 Idea Machine prize competition. One of the winners, Vincent Conitzer (Duke University), was at the second AI Roadmap workshop on Interaction in January 2019. Conitzer’s challenge is to discover models of conscious experience. See the press release below to learn more.  The NSF 2026 Idea Machine encouraged individuals from all walks of life, age 14 or older, to submit pressing “grand challenges” requiring fundamental research in science, engineering, or STEM education in order to inform NSF’s long-term planning. Approximately 800 entries were received from nearly every state […]

Yesterday, the President released his FY2021 budget request. The request includes a significant increase in nondefense AI R&D compared to the FY 2020 Budget and a commitment to double nondefense AI R&D by 2022. If enacted, it would bring spending for AI R&D and interdisciplinary research institutes at the National Science Foundation (NSF) to more than $830 million, which represents a more than 70 percent increase over the FY 2020 budget. This increase would map well to A 20-Year Community Roadmap for AI Research in the US, which was released by the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) and the computing research community in late 2019. The roadmap, led by Yolanda Gil […]