By Cherri Pancake, ACM President As the coronavirus/COVID-19 pandemic continues, we at ACM would like to do what we can to help support the computing community. Many computing researchers and practitioners are now working remotely. In addition, teaching and learning have also moved online as more and more campuses close. We believe that ACM can help support research, discovery and learning during this time of crisis by opening the ACM Digital Library to all. For the next three months, there will be no fees assessed for accessing or downloading work published by ACM. We hope this will help researchers, practitioners and students maintain access to our publications as well as increasing visibility […]

Contributions to this post were provided by CCC Council members Katie Siek (Indiana University) and Shwetak Patel (University of Washington).  Many people around the country are in week three of their resolutions to monitoring their health with their fitness trackers. These mobile health devices are becoming more common. The iphone track your steps, maybe without you even realizing it, as does this necklace and this ring. Researchers have been talking about mobile health devices for years. The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) held 2016 workshop on Discovery and Innovation in Smart and Pervasive Health and then at AAAS 2017 CCC had a session on “Health in Your Pocket: Diagnosing and Treating […]

Contributions to this post were provided by CCC Chair Mark D. Hill from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and CCC Executive Committee Member Nadya Bliss from Arizona State University. The leadership of the Department of Defense (DoD) tasked the Defense Innovation Board (DIB) with proposing Artificial Intelligence (AI) Ethics Principles for DoD for the design, development, and deployment of AI for both combat and non-combat purposes.  “The mission of the DIB is to provide the Secretary of Defense, Deputy Secretary of Defense, and other senior leaders across the Department with independent advice and recommendations on innovative means to address future challenges through the prism of three focus areas: people and culture, […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) recently released the Thermodynamic Computing workshop report, the output of the CCC’s January 2019 visioning workshop of the same name. The workshop was organized by Tom Conte (Georgia Tech), Erik DeBenedictis (former Sandia National Laboratories), Natesh Ganesh (University of Massachusetts Amherst), Todd Hylton (UC San Diego), Susanne Still (University of Hawaii), John Paul Strachan (Hewlett Packard Lab HPE), R. Stanley Williams (Texas A&M). It brought together physical theorists, electrical and computer engineers, electronic/ionic device researchers, and theoretical biologists to explore a novel idea: computing as an open thermodynamic system. The report begins by explaining the need for thermodynamic computers: with the end of Moore’s Law and Dennard […]

The MacArthur Foundation recently announced its 2019 MacArthur Fellows – “26 extraordinary MacArthur Fellows demonstrate the power of individual creativity to reframe old problems, spur reflection, create new knowledge, and better the world for everyone. They give us reason for hope, and they inspire us all to follow our own creative instincts.” The MacArthur Fellows program grants each recipient a no-strings-attached stipend of $625,000 in order to support his or her own creative and professional ambitions. The program features scientists, artists, historians, and writers. The 2019 Fellows class features one computer scientist: Joshua Tenanbaum, a Cognitive Scientist in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. […]

The following post is from Khari Douglas, who is currently at the 2019 Heidelberg Laureate Forum in Heidelberg Germany.  Every year at the Heidelberg Laureate Forum (HLF) a hot topic, or theme, related to mathematics and computer science is chosen to be addressed by a panel of experts. At this year’s HLF the hot topic sessions, which took place on Tuesday, September 24th, focused on climate change and what we can do to tackle the problem. The sessions addressed questions like: “How can we predict the next century’s climate if we can hardly predict this weekend’s weather? Is the latest flooding or heat wave due to climate change, or not? Why […]