Significant contributions to this post were provided by CCC Senior Program Associate, Khari Douglas.  The Marconi Society, a nonprofit chaired by Vint Cerf and dedicated to bridging the digital divide, held a virtual symposium on Friday, October 22nd, to celebrate the newest Marconi Fellow Andrea Goldsmith.  Friday’s symposium was really a call to action for the computing, and specifically networking, community. The three keynote speakers Doreen Bogdan-Martin (International Telecommunications Union), Jessica Rosenworcel (Federal Communications Commission), and Andrea Goldsmith (Princeton University) all made the case for the urgent, pressing need for expanding access to connectivity.  In her keynote, Bogdan-Martin stated that 3.7 billion people still have no online connectivity, which is […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC), the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) and ACM SIGAI sponsored a virtual workshop, entitled Artificial Intelligence / Operations Research Workshop to provide a space for the Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Operations Research (OR) to discuss a joint strategic vision for a strong and sustained collaboration between the two fields. Organized by Sanmay Das (George Mason University), John Dickerson (University of Maryland), Pascal Van Hentenryck (Georgia Tech), Sven Koenig (University of Southern California), Ramayya Krishnan (Carnegie Mellon University), Radhika Kulkarni (SAS Institute, Inc. – retired), Phebe Vayanos (University of Southern California) the workshop was held on September 24th – 25th, 2021. There […]

The following is a recent message to the community from Lynne E. Parker, Director of the National Artificial Intelligence Initiative Office and Assistant Director of Artificial Intelligence at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). Dear Colleagues, I’m happy to report that OSTP released a blueprint for a National Strategic Computing Reserve.  This concept is modeled after the highly successful COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium, which advanced COVID-19 research during the early days of the pandemic. Report direct link: https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/National-Strategic-Computing-Reserve-Blueprint-Oct2021.pdf NSTC site which includes the new report: https://www.whitehouse.gov/ostp/nstc/ OSTP tweet link: https://twitter.com/WHOSTP/status/1445440967264321536 Feel free to share the news with your interested colleagues. Best regards, Lynne

Former Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council member and Professor of Computer Science &  Engineering and Electrical & Computer Engineering at the University of Washington, Shwetak Patel, was just anointed to the Georgia Tech College of Computing’s Hall of Fame and Business Insider’s list of “30 leaders under 40” who are changing healthcare. He is being recognized for a broad scope of work ranging from home energy monitoring (Zensi) to a mobile health company (Senosis Health). Along with being a professor and head of Ubicomp Lab, Patel holds the Washington Research Foundation Entrepreneurship Endowed Professorship; is the Director of health technologies at Google Health and FitBit Research; was the recipient of […]

The following is joint Dear Colleague Letter from Assistant Directors at the National Science Foundation about innovative solutions to climate change. The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) released a whitepaper in August 2021 on Computing Research for the Climate Crisis, coauthored by Nadya Bliss (Arizona State University), Elizabeth Bradley (University of Colorado Boulder), and Claire Monteleoni (University of Colorado Boulder and a CCAI Advisor), to highlight the role of computing research in addressing climate change-induced challenges. See the full whitepaper here.  Dear Colleagues: This Dear Colleague Letter (DCL) encourages the science and engineering communities to develop forward-thinking research that will demonstrably aid in the Nation’s goal of reaching net-zero greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions […]

The following is a guest blog post from Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council member Kathleen Fisher (Tufts University). Going to DARPA as a Program Manager (PM) is a great opportunity to make a difference by creating and managing a program much bigger in scope than what an individual faculty member can do at a university. Other PMs are talented and innovative thinkers who come from a broad range of backgrounds. Exposure to them and to the range of problems DARPA is reckoning with can be eye-opening. In the following paragraphs, I describe my experiences serving as a PM to convey a sense of what the job is like and why […]