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 […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is pleased to announce the release of the Assured Autonomy report, titled Assured Autonomy: Path Toward Living With Autonomous Systems We Can Trust.   The report is the result of a year-long effort by the CCC and over 100 members of the research community, led by Ufuk Topcu (The University of Texas at Austin). Workshop organizers included Nadya Bliss (Arizona State University and CCC), Nancy Cooke (Arizona State University), Missy Cummings (Duke University), Ashley Llorens (Johns Hopkins University, Applied Physics Laboratory), Howard Shrobe (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), and Lenore Zuck (University of Illinois at Chicago).  Given the immense interest and investment in autonomy, a series of […]

Interested in embedded security? Apply to join the second annual Embedded Security Workshop. The workshop will be hosted by Kevin Fu, former CCC Council Member and principal investigator of the SPQR Lab at the University of Michigan. From their website: “The workshop consists of a diverse set of talks by leading faculty and industrial researchers across the world ranging from medical device security to physics of analog sensor cybersecurity. Students will give lightning pitches of their research and participate in small breakout groups for discussion. The speakers range from industrial researchers to practicing neurosurgeons. The event focuses on improving diversity and inclusion for leading research in embedded security. There is […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) recently released the Leadership in Embedded Security workshop report. The workshop was organized by former CCC Council Member Kevin Fu (University of Michigan), Wayne Burleson (UMass Amherst), and Farinaz Koushanfar (UC, San Diego). It brought together around fifty academics, industrial researchers, and government agency program managers who work close to the topic of embedded security. The workshop included deep dive group discussions as well as short visionary talks by several international speakers to lend perspectives on successful strategies for funding embedded security research overseas. The report, titled Grand Challenges for Embedded Security Research in a Connected World, focuses on the challenges and potential research opportunities across five […]

With input from the U.S. Department of Labor’s Office of Child Labor, Forced Labor and Human Trafficking, the National Science Foundation (NSF) recently published a new solicitation on Disrupting Operations of Illicit Supply Networks (D-ISN) “to support the research needed to inform the economy, security, and resilience of the Nation and the world in responding to the global threat posed by illicit supply networks.” The proposal deadline is July 1st, 2020.  Major goals of NSF’s D-ISN include: Improve understanding of the operations of illicit supply networks and strengthen the ability to detect, disrupt, and dismantle them. Enhance research communities that effectively integrate operational, computational, social, cultural and economic expertise to […]