In cooperation with the International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS), the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is pleased to invite submissions to a Challenges and Visions Track at AAMAS 2013, to be held in St. Paul, Minnesota, May 6-10, 2013. The emphasis of this track is on visionary ideas, long-term challenges, and new research opportunities that are outside the current mainstream of the field. In this way, this track will serve as an incubator for innovative approaches, risky and provocative ideas, and to propose challenges and opportunities for the field in the near future.

Judea Pearl received the 2011 ACM A. M. Turing Award “for fundamental contributions to artificial intelligence through the development of a calculus for probabilistic and causal reasoning.” In this guest post, Douglas Fisher, associate professor of computer science and computer engineering at Vanderbilt, summarizes Pearl’s Turing Award Lecture, delivered at last week’s AAAI Conference. Professor Pearl delivered his Turing Award Lecture as the opening invited address at the 26th AAAI Conference in Toronto, Canada, last week. He opened by acknowledging the support of the AAAI community in a great collaborative enterprise, a remarkable “journey” as he said, and he shared the award with the community and his coauthors. He also cited […]

IBM and IEEE have partnered to launch the Smarter Planet Challenge, seeking “creative team-based student projects that can help students at any level learn about applying engineering, science, and other disciplines to solve real world problems.” The competition — which will dole out prizes ranging from $1,000 to $5,000 to the top five entries — allows students to submit either completed projects or ideas in any one of five areas of interest (following the link):

Dan Kaufman, director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) Information Innovation Office (I2O), was interviewed on Tuesday evening by New York Times‘ tech writer John Markoff — the first in a series of conversations with “amazing people at research labs” being produced this summer by the Computer History Museum. During the hourlong interview, Kaufman — Markoff describes him as “not your standard, cookie-cutter DARPA official — touches on a bit of history about DARPA, his own personal background and how he landed at the agency, and a variety of projects he and his colleagues in I2O are currently spearheading. Check out the full-length video and summary after the jump…

To help mark the 60th anniversary of its Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP), the National Science Foundation (NSF) has announced a new video contest — “Creating the Future” — that challenges Fellows to create short videos, not to exceed 90 seconds each, communicating how their NSF-funded research will help shape the future for themselves, for their field, or for the world. Submissions are due by Sept. 14, 2012, and winners — to be selected by a panel of judges as well as the broader public for a “People’s Choice” award category — will be announced in mid-November. First place carries a $2,000 cash prize. According to the contest website (following the link):

At the Computing Research Association’s (CRA) biennial Snowbird Conference today, the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board (CSTB) will roll out a new report — “Continuing Innovation in Information Technology” — updating the widely known “tire tracks” diagram that links government investments in academic and industry research to the creation of new information technology industries that drive our economy. According to the report (click on the link below to read more and see the new “tire tracks” figure!):