The following Great Innovative Idea is from John E. Laird from the Unversity of Michigan. Laird was one of the Blue Sky Award winners at the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Conference (AAAI-18) for his paper, coauthored with Shiwali Mohan from the Palo Alto Research Center, on Learning Fast and Slow: Levels of Learning in General Autonomous Intelligent Agents. The Idea Our cool idea is that there are two distinct levels at which humans and general AI systems can learn. Level 1 encompasses innate architectural learning mechanisms that are automatic, online, and effortless – capturing knowledge from the agent’s ongoing experience, such as learning skills, experiential knowledge, or facts. Level 2 encompasses deliberate learning strategies that are realized through the […]

Mozilla is currently seeking proposals for research funding to support its mission: to ensure the internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to all. These grants include topics directly relevant to current research, as well as topics that fit more broadly with their vision for improving the internet and implementing the principles of their manifesto. Mozilla funds research in a wide variety of ways, including building new technologies, improving existing technologies, and studying how people use technology. Their research domains include Emerging Technologies’ four core areas: Open Web Platform, such as Rust, Servo and Daala. We recently funded projects testing the Rust and bindgen compilers, and implementing Typed WebAssembly. Mixed Reality, […]

The following is a letter to the community from James Kurose, Assistant Director, and Erwin Gianchandani, Deputy Assistant Director, of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Directorate of Computer & Information Science & Engineering (CISE).   Dear CISE Community, Much has happened since our email (regarding the President’s FY 2019 Budget Request for the National Science Foundation) last month, and so we wanted to provide an update below. FISCAL YEAR 2018 First and foremost, as you’ve probably read in the media, Congress passed a spending bill for FY 2018 (the current fiscal year, ending on September 30, 2018) this past week, which was signed into law on Friday by the President. Under this FY 2018 budget,  NSF’s funding will […]

CCC Chair Beth Mynatt provided contributions to this post. How do you successfully accomplish human-centered computing research and design? Focus on users who are not you. Figure out someone else’s computing technology barriers and try to address them. Use these insights as the force that drives your research. Just some words of advice from Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Chair, Executive Director of Georgia Tech’s Institute for People and Technology (IPaT), College of Computing Distinguished Professor, and the Director of the Everyday Computing Lab, Beth Mynatt who was recently interviewed by her former student, Andrew Miller, for ACM’s Future of Computing Academy Computing Across Disciplines podcast. Beth talked about her work in advancing technology in […]

CCC Chair Elizabeth Mynatt from Georgia Tech and former CCC Council member Shashi Shekhar from the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, provided contributions to this post. How can we really be sure that autonomous vehicles are safe? Is a road test the way to do it, or do we need to test every software patch in a vehicle before it gets on the highway? Why did Walmart file a patent for robotic bee pollinators? One of the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) sessions at the recent 2018 American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Annual Meeting in Austin, TX was on Transforming Cities, Transportation, and Agriculture with Intelligent Infrastructure and these […]

Between December 2016 and August 2017, at least 24 employees of the U.S Embassy in Cuba heard high-pitched sounds and suffered injuries thought to be related to the noise. Many speculated that the high-pitched sounds were some high-frequency sonic weapon. When Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council member, Kevin Fu from the University of Michigan, looked at the spectral plot of the clip he saw some unusual ripples. Fu worked with his collaborator, Wenyuan Xu, a professor at Zhejiang University, in Hangzhou, China, and her Ph.D. student Chen Yan, and through a series of simulations, saw that an effect known as intermodulation distortion could have produced the sound. Intermodulation distortion occurs when […]