The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) will hold a visioning workshop in Atlanta, GA on March 14-15, 2019 to discuss and articulate research visions for authoring rich media content for new workforce training. The workshop aims to articulate research challenges and needs and to summarize the current state of the practice in this area. This workshop is in response to growing needs in the field and new research programs such as the National Science Foundation (NSF) Future of Work at the Human-Technology Frontier: Advancing Cognitive and Physical Capabilities (FW-HTF). Historically, materials such as books and movies were used in addition to hands-on experiences for education and practical training. Increasingly, various other types of computer generated […]

In July, Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council member Manuela Veloso will join JPMorgan Chase & Co. as head of artificial-intelligence research. She is currently the head of the Machine Learning Department at Carnegie Mellon University. From the J.P. Morgan Press Release: J.P. Morgan has already started to apply machine learning technology across its businesses and functions, and this expanded effort will be aimed at identifying further opportunities. A.I. is among the areas of investment within the bank’s annual technology budget of $10.8 billion, with more than half earmarked for new investments. Veloso is a Past President of AAAI (Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence), and the co-founder and a Past President of […]

The following blog post is by Robotic Materials organizer Nikolaus Correll from the University of Colorado at Boulder. The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) recently sponsored a workshop on “Robotic Materials” in Washington, DC. This workshop was the second in a series of interdisciplinary workshops aimed at transforming our notion of materials to become “robotic”, that is have the ability to sense and impact their environment. Participants were recruited from a diverse set of stakeholders including material and computer scientists, researchers in government labs, industry, government agencies, and policymakers. There was broad agreement that computation will become an important part of future material systems. Computation will allow materials to analyze, change, store […]

The following Great Innovative Idea is from Laura Major, the Vice President of Engineering at CyPhy Works. Major was one of the Blue Sky Award winners at the International Symposium on Robotics Research (ISRR 17) in Puerto Varas, Chile for her paper, Autonomous Agents in the Wild: Human Interaction Challenges.  The Idea Autonomy is moving into commercial applications, where it is being encountered by untrained, unfamiliar consumers. These individuals, with little exposure to autonomy or its principles, will be using advanced automation to perform safety-critical tasks such as driving their cars or flying video-capture drones. While advanced automation has been applied in industrial applications for decades, with experts using it to monitor and control highly […]

The following Great Innovative Idea is from Jaime Fernandez Fisac, a Ph.D. Candidate in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences Department at the University of California, Berkeley, in the area of Control, Intelligent Systems and Robotics. Fisac was one of the Blue Sky Award winners at the International Symposium on Robotics Research (ISRR 17) in Puerto Varas, Chile for his paper, Pragmatic-Pedagogic Value Alignment. The Idea Advances in robotics and AI are making robots increasingly capable and autonomous, but how will we ensure they understand what things they should or should not do? Our insight is that a competent robot collaborator should behave like a keen apprentice: humans are naturally skilled at social collaboration, and robots can exploit this fact to tap into […]

Contributions to this post were provided by CCC Exec member Ben Zorn.  Do you worry that the Bluetooth-enabled smart fork you just got for Christmas is trying to steal your password? Do you wonder what software was used to implement your smart fork and when it was last updated? These are questions we’ve never had to ask until now. Microsoft Research Podcast recently interviewed Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Executive Council member and CCC Intelligent Infrastructure (II) Task Force Co-Chair Ben Zorn, from Microsoft Research, on programming languages and how they are impacting the world. In the Podcast, Zorn talked about the Internet of Things. When we embed computing into infrastructure, […]