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 […]
Computing Community Consortium Blog
The goal of the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is to catalyze the computing research community to debate longer range, more audacious research challenges; to build consensus around research visions; to evolve the most promising visions toward clearly defined initiatives; and to work with the funding organizations to move challenges and visions toward funding initiatives. The purpose of this blog is to provide a more immediate, online mechanism for dissemination of visioning concepts and community discussion/debate about them.
A CERN for Climate Change and the National Security Implications of Cybersecurity
September 26th, 2019 / in Announcements, CCC, pipeline, research horizons, Research News, resources / by Helen WrightApply by Oct. 8 for the 2020-2021 AAAS Leshner Leadership Institute in Artificial Intelligence!
September 25th, 2019 / in AAAS, AI, Announcements / by Helen WrightThere’s less than two weeks left to apply for the 2020-2021 cohort of AAAS Leshner Leadership Fellows! This program convenes mid-career scientists who demonstrate leadership in their research careers and in promoting meaningful dialogue between science and society. Each year, 15 Leshner Fellows from disciplines at the nexus of important science-society issues convene for a week of public engagement and science communication training and public engagement plan development in Washington, DC, then continue their activities while at their home institutions during the fellowship year. The 2020-2021 cohort will be comprised of active researchers in the field of artificial intelligence, new and emerging technologies that seek to replicate, mimic or augment human […]
Can We Trust Autonomous Systems and Seeing the Classics at the Technik Museum Speyer
September 25th, 2019 / in AI / by Khari DouglasIn Tuesday’s opening lecture at the Heidelberg Laureate Forum (HLF), Joseph Sifakis, 2007 Turing Award winner, discussed whether we can trust autonomous systems and considered the interplay between the trustworthiness of the system – the system’s ability to behave as expected despite mishaps – and the criticality of the task – the severity of the impact an error will have on the fulfillment of a task. Sifakis defined autonomy as the combination of five complementary functions – perception, reflection, goal management, planning, and self-awareness/adaption. The better a given system can manage these functions the higher the level of autonomy we say that it has, from 0 (no automation) to 5 (full automation, no […]
Artificial Intelligence and the Challenge of Modeling the Brain’s Behavior
September 24th, 2019 / in AI, conferences / by Khari DouglasYesterday morning at the Heidelberg Laureate Forum (HLF) laureates Yoshua Bengio (2018 Turing Award), Edvard Moser (2014 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine), and Leslie G. Valiant (1986 Nevanlinna Prize and 2010 Turing Award) each presented a lecture related to artificial intelligence or the modeling of the brain. Yoshua Bengio’s lecture on “Deep Learning for AI” provided a retrospective of some of the key principles behind the recent successes of deep learning. Dr. Bengio’s work has mostly been in neural networks, which are inspired by the computation found in the human brain. One of the key insights in the field came with the representation of words as vectors of numbers. This allowed relationships between words to be learned […]
Margaret Martonosi Selected as the New AD for CISE!
September 23rd, 2019 / in Announcements, NSF, Research News / by Helen WrightThe Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is delighted National Science Foundation (NSF) Director France Córdova has selected Margaret Martonosi as the next head of the Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Directorate at NSF! Martonosi will assume the role of Assistant Director (AD), CISE on February 1, 2020. “On behalf of myself, the CCC, and the computing research community, we are thrilled with the selection of Margaret Martonosi as CISE AD,” said Mark D. Hill, CCC Chair. “I have known Margaret for three decades and admired her creative work ranging from hardware power efficiency to a deep, formal understanding of memory consistency models. For the CCC, I am particularly impressed […]
HLF 2019 Kicks Off with a Q&A with ACM President Cherri Pancake (plus La La Lab and the Science of Music)
September 23rd, 2019 / in big science, conferences / by Khari DouglasThe 7th annual Heidelberg Laureate Forum (HLF) has officially begun! Yesterday (September 21st) was the opening ceremony, which included a “science slam” on the history and founding of HLF from Andreas Reuter, Scientific Chairperson of the Heidelberg Laureate Forum Foundation, as well as a Q&A session with Cherri M. Pancake, President of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), Carlos E. Kenig, President of the International Mathematical Union (IMU), and Hans Petter Graver, President of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters (DNVA). To top it off the opening ceremony was followed by a reception, giving the young researchers opportunities to mingle with each other and the 23 laureates in mathematics and computer science that are in attendance. During the Q&A session, Cherri Pancake was asked about the […]
