It was just announced that Eric Horvitz, former Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council member and current Co-Chair of the AI and Robotics Task Force, is the new head of Microsoft Research. Yesterday, it was announced that Jeannette Wing was leaving to lead Columbia’s Data Science Institute. Horvitz has long been a leading voice in AI safety and ethics. Recently, he announced the new Partnership on AI that consists of a consortium including Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Facebook, and IBM. The goal of the partnership is to bring industry together to talk about the use of AI for humanity’s benefit. From Quartz: Horvitz wants to fundamentally change the way humans interact with machines, whether that’s building a new way […]

The Noah Harding Professor of Computer Science and Professor of Bioengineering at Rice University, Lydia E. Kavraki, has been named the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) 2017-2018 Athena Lecturer. Each year, the Athena Lecturer award celebrates women researchers who have made fundamental contributions to computer science. Kavraki has been cited for the invention of randomized motion-planning algorithms in robotics and the development of robotics-inspired methods for bioinformatics and biomedicine. From the ACM Press Release: Kavraki’s 1996 doctoral dissertation proposed the Probabilistic Roadmap Method (PRM), a technique to plan the motion of robots, which had been an enduring challenge in the field. The Probabilistic Roadmap Method was immediately hailed for its simple […]

CCC Council Member Kevin Fu from the University of Michigan contributed to this post.  On April 12th, the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) and MForesight: Alliance for Manufacturing Foresight (MForesight), in conjunction with the House Manufacturing Caucus, held a Congressional briefing on Cybersecurity for Manufacturers that highlighted the outcomes of the March workshop of the same name and discussed the challenges to cybersecurity and potential next steps for its improvement in the U.S. manufacturing space. The briefing featured members of the CCC and MForesight, as well as experts from government, academia, and the private sector: Ann Drobnis, CCC Director Robert Frazier, Lockheed Martin Kevin Fu, University of Michigan/CCC Council Member Sridhar […]

The National Science Foundation (NSF) Engineering Directorate‘s Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) program has awarded 156 early career engineering faculty with at least $500,000 for their plan to make advances in engineering. The CAREER program, which extends across all of the agency’s science and engineering directorates, allows promising junior faculty to pursue outstanding research and excellence in education while integrating both. Awardees have the flexibility to explore unexpected new terrain uncovered in the course of their research. A number of these CAREER winners have ties to computer science: CAREER: Integrated Research and Education on Delta-Sigma Based Digital Signal Processing Circuits for Low-Power Intelligent Sensors Principal Investigator: Wei Tang, New Mexico State University From […]

Check out the following updates from Data Science at the National Institutes of Health (NIH).  The Big Data to Knowledge (BD2K) Guide to the Fundamentals of Data Science Webinar Series hosts “Open Science” by Dr. Brian Nosek, University of Virginia, April 14, 2017. The BD2K Guide is a webinar series given by experts from across the country covering a range of diverse topics in data science, Fridays, 12:00pm – 1:00pm ET/9:00am – 10:00am PT. The webinars are free to attend and open to the public, no registration required. To join the webinars or to view archived presentations, visit this website. The Mobilize Center and the Mobile Sensor Data-to-Knowledge Center (MD2K), […]

The next WATCH talk, called The Jekyll and Hyde of Smart Contracts is Thursday, April 20th, from 12 – 1 PM ET. The presenter is Ari Juels, a Professor of Computer Science at the Jacobs Institute at Cornell Tech in New York City. He is also Co-Director of the Initiative for CryptoCurrencies and Contracts (IC3). He was previously Chief Scientist at RSA, and received his PhD from UC Berkeley in 1996. Abstract Smart contracts are autonomous programs that run on and inherit the properties of blockchains. They may be viewed as emulating trusted third parties, in that they enforce fair play between parties without preexisting trust relationships. This capability promises to […]