The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is pleased to announce the release of a new white paper,  A National Discovery Cloud: Preparing the US for Global Competitiveness in the New Era of 21st Century Digital Transformation, led by Ian Foster with significant support from Daniel Lopresti, Bill Gropp, Mark D. Hill, and Katie Schuman. The three “pillars,” as the paper calls them, of this new computation fabric include the “emergence of public cloud utilities as a new computing platform; the ability to extract information from enormous quantities of data via machine learning; and the emergence of computational simulation as a research method on par with experimental science.”  In order for the […]

The Biden administration today appointed Stefanie Tompkins to run the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) as its 23rd Director. DARPA is a $3.5 billion a year research and development agency of the United States Department of Defense, whose mission is to make pivotal investments in breakthrough technologies for national security. From the press release:  “With nearly eleven years of DARPA service under her belt, Tompkins, a former military intelligence officer in the U.S. Army, has an exceptional understanding of the agency’s culture. From 2007 through 2017, she held multiple positions, including program manager and deputy director of the Strategic Technology Office, a systems-oriented technical office; DARPA chief of staff; […]

Contributions to this post were provided by CCC Vice Chair Daniel Lopresti.  AI for Good Global Summit hosted a webinar on AI to Prevent Modern Slavery, Human Trafficking and Forced and Child Labour today and featured Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Executive Council Member Nadya Bliss (Executive Director of the Global Security Initiative at Arizona State University) as well as Alice Eckstein (Programme Manager, Modern Slavery Programme at United Nations University – Centre for Policy Research), Doreen Boyd (Professor of Earth Observation, Faculty of Social Sciences at University of Nottingham), James Goulding (Deputy Director N/LAB, Faculty of Social Sciences at University of Nottingham) and Anjali Mazumder (Thematic Lead on AI, Justice […]

Significant contributions were provided by CCC Senior Program Associate, Khari Douglas.  The virtual AAAS 2021 meeting took place February 8th – 11th, 2021 and included a highly topical session titled Computing, Artificial Intelligence, and Societal Impacts: An Inflection Point. The February 10th event included former Computing Research Association (CRA) board member Moshe Vardi (Rice University), Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Executive Council member Suresh Venkatasubramanian (University of Utah), Seny Kamara (Brown University), and Dan Reed (University of Utah) as speakers. This session aimed to show how the computing revolution has democratized access to information and disrupted entire economic sectors, with associated human effects, both positive and negative. Likewise, this computing revolution […]

Every February, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) — the world’s largest multidisciplinary scientific society and the publisher of the Science family of journals — holds the AAAS Annual Meeting, which brings together scientists, engineers, and press to share and discuss their work with each other. The 2021 Annual Meeting will take place virtually next week, February 8-11. The theme of this year’s meeting is “Understanding Dynamic Ecosystems.”  The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) has attended and hosted sessions at the AAAS Annual Meeting since 2013 — learn more about those past sessions here. This year, the CCC’s official podcast, Catalyzing Computing, is part of the Sci-Mic virtual […]

Nadya Bliss, Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Executive Council member and Executive Director of the Global Security Initiative (GSI), was recently interviewed by her local CBS affiliate station on tracking how misinformation and disinformation spreads on social media and why, in recent years, it is spreading more rapidly.  “Around events that are changing really rapidly, the information ecosystem is particularly sensitive to all kinds of noise. Whether it’s misinformation without intent or disinformation with intent,” Bliss said. “It’s very difficult for an individual to be able to parse everything and we’re very susceptible. We’re in this moment where we are consistently checking, which makes us more vulnerable. False information tends to spread […]