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 […]

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has a number of upcoming funding opportunities. Computational and Data-Enabled Science and Engineering  (CDS&E) (PD 12-8084) Full Proposal Window: September 30, 2019 Advanced computational infrastructure and the ability to perform large-scale simulations and accumulate massive amounts of data have revolutionized scientific and engineering disciplines. The goal of the CDS&E program is to identify and capitalize on opportunities for major scientific and engineering breakthroughs through new computational and data analysis approaches. See more at this website here. Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE): Core Programs (NSF 19-589) Full Proposal Window: September 30, 2019 The NSF CISE Directorate supports research and education projects that develop new […]

The following blog was written by Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Chair Mark D. Hill from the University of Wisconsin Madison.  This week Cerebras announced a bold design to accelerate deep neural networks with silicon that is not cut into chips. AI and Moore’s Law: Artificial Intelligence (AI) is much in the news for what it can do to today and the promise of what it can do tomorrow (CCC/AAAI 20-Year AI Roadmap). Over half a century, AI innovation has been abetted by a million-fold progress in computer system cost-performance and parallelism. For decades, computer benefits came transparently via repeated doubling of processor performance (popularly called “Moore’s Law”). For the last decade, however, AI–especially for the great successes of […]