The following blog post is by Robotic Materials organizer Nikolaus Correll from the University of Colorado at Boulder. The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) recently sponsored a workshop on “Robotic Materials” in Washington, DC. This workshop was the second in a series of interdisciplinary workshops aimed at transforming our notion of materials to become “robotic”, that is have the ability to sense and impact their environment. Participants were recruited from a diverse set of stakeholders including material and computer scientists, researchers in government labs, industry, government agencies, and policymakers. There was broad agreement that computation will become an important part of future material systems. Computation will allow materials to analyze, change, store […]

The 17th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC) on October 8-12, 2018 in Monterey, CA is having a blue ideas paper track sponsored by the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Blue Sky ideas Conference track.  The blue sky ideas paper track solicits visionary ideas, long-term challenges, and opportunities in the semantic web research that are outside of the current topics in the field and are not mature or specific enough to be accepted in the regular research track. The contributions should find the right arguments to convince that the proposed topic is promising and should relate the talk as much as possible to the existing literature from relevant fields, possibly also fields outside […]

Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Chair Beth Mynatt from Georgia Tech received the Strong Ally recognition yesterday at the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2018 in Montréal, Canada. From the ACM CHI website: Strong Ally – Recognizes individuals who have leveraged their professional expertise and institutional privilege to be a reliable ally and strategic partner advocating for the rights and full inclusion of people of marginalized identities. During her acceptance speech, Beth talked about three important things that she has learned. Foster impatience. Impatience that drives you to create opportunities for those around you to do the work our community wants and needs to do to create an inclusive future. Second, create […]

The next WATCH talk, called The Hidden Multi-Billion Dollar International Trade in Our Medical Data, from Adam Tanner, Author of “Our Bodies, Our Data:  How Companies Make Billions Selling Our Medical Records,” is Tuesday, May 1st 2018, Noon-1PM EST. Adam Tanner is a leading expert on the business of personal data and privacy. He is the author of Our Bodies, Our Data: How Companies Make Billions Selling Our Medical Records (2017) and What Stays in Vegas: The World of Personal Data – Lifeblood of Big Business – and the End of Privacy as We Know It.  He is an associate at Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University, where he has been a fellow, writer and associate since 2011. He […]

On March 12th-14th, the National Academies of Science held an Arthur M. Sackler Colloquia on Creativity and Collaboration: Revisiting Cybernetic Serendipity. The colloquia, organized by Ben Shneiderman (University of Maryland), Maneesh Agrawala (Stanford), Alyssa Goodman (Harvard), Youngmoo Kim (Drexel), and Roger Malina (UT Dallas), examined the historical framework of cybernetic serendipity –the concept of unplanned creation derived from cybernetic processes. The term is derived from an exhibition of cybernetic art curated by Jasia Reichardt that toured touring the United States in the late 1960s. The colloquia attempted to answer: “How should we re-envision research policy and educational structures to maximize the impact of partnerships with design, art, and humanities? How can we productively engage […]

The following is from the ACM SIGARCH Computer Architecture Today Blog by CCC Vice Chair Mark D. Hill, the John P. Morgridge Professor and Gene M. Amdahl Professor of Computer Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. ACM recently announced that computer scientists John Hennessy and David Patterson have shared the 2017 ACM Turing Award with the official citation, “For pioneering a systematic, quantitative approach to the design and evaluation of computer architectures with enduring impact on the microprocessor industry.” The Turing Award is the highest award in computer science. It is given for “lasting and major technical importance to the computer field” and has been compared to a Nobel Prize, whose categories pre-date […]