The National Science Foundation (NSF) will hold a webinar for their proposal solicitation “Safe-Learning Enabled Systems” on April 5th, 2023, 1:00-2:00 PM Eastern Time. Webinar Synopsis: As artificial intelligence (AI) systems rapidly increase in size, acquire new capabilities, and are deployed in high-stakes settings, their safety becomes extremely important. Ensuring system safety requires more than improving accuracy, efficiency, and scalability: it requires ensuring that systems are robust to extreme events, and monitoring them for anomalous and unsafe behavior.   The objective of the Safe Learning-Enabled Systems program, which is a partnership between the National Science Foundation, Open Philanthropy and Good Ventures, is to foster foundational research that leads to the […]

Last week the National Science Foundation celebrated the one year anniversary of their Directorate for Technology, Innovations and Partnerships (TIP). TIP was created to harness the nation’s vast and diverse talent pool to accelerate critical and emerging technologies and address pressing societal and economic challenges. TIP comprises three primary focus areas – fostering innovation and technology ecosystems, establishing translation pathways, and partnering across sectors to improve U.S. competitiveness, grow the U.S. economy and engage and train a diverse workforce for future, high-wage jobs. The following is a letter from Erwin Gianchandani (Assistant Director for TIP) and Gracie Narcho (Deputy Assistant Director for TIP) on TIP’s accomplishments over the last year. […]

The below post was originally published in the CRA Bulletin. Bill Wulf was a friend and supporter of the CCC during his many years in the computing research community. His wife, Anita Jones, was a Founding Member of the CCC and remained on the Council until 2014. She has continued to be an avid supporter of postdocs in the community, and was a key member of the Steering Committee for the recent CIFellows programs.      CRA was sad to learn of the loss of former Board member William A. Wulf. He was an outstanding leader in the computing research community and will be greatly missed. Wulf served on the CRA Board […]

The National Academy of Engineering (NAE) just elected 106 new members and 18 international members. Election to the NAE is among the highest professional distinctions accorded to an engineer. Academy membership honors those who have made outstanding contributions to “engineering research, practice, or education, including, where appropriate, significant contributions to the engineering literature” and to “the pioneering of new and developing fields of technology, making major advancements in traditional fields of engineering, or developing/implementing innovative approaches to engineering education.” Among the new members are Fu Cheng (Columbia University) and Stefan Savage (University of California, San Diego), who have previously collaborated with the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) and the Computing Research […]

AI generative models have recently taken the world by storm creating digital art, music and prose. Among these innovations is a new language model called ChatGPT on openai.com. Using this tool, users can ask ChatGPT anything ranging from answering homework questions to identifying potential research directions. Something that sets ChatGPT apart from other language models is its ability to create more natural and accurate language when answering questions and requests. ChatGPT’s answers are extremely similar if not identical to human responses. This has presented a multitude of concerns over plagiarism and misinformation. Something that could help curb these concerns is a means of detecting text generated by language models. Former […]

This week the National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource (NAIRR) Task Force released a roadmap to establish a national research infrastructure aimed to broaden access to resources for AI research and development. There are ever increasing opportunities to work with cutting-edge AI technologies, but many of the opportunities are limited to large companies, organizations and academic institutions with an abundance of resources. The implementation plan, Strengthening and Democratizing the U.S. Artificial Intelligence Innovation Ecosystem, aims to provide AI researchers and students with access to computational resources, high-quality data, training tools, and user support. The report lays out the following goals for the NAIRR: Provide AI researchers and students with significantly expanded […]