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.

Great Innovative Idea- Acquiring Object Experiences at Scale

October 7th, 2015 / in Great Innovative Idea, research horizons, Research News, robotics / by Helen Wright

The following Great Innovative Idea is from John Oberlin, Maria Meier, Tim Kraska, and Stefanie Tellex in the Computer Science Department at Brown University. Their Acquiring Object Experiences at Scale was one of the winners at the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) sponsored Blue Sky Ideas Track Competition at the AAAI-RSS Special Workshop on the 50th Anniversary of Shakey: The Role of AI to Harmonize Robots and Humans in Rome, Italy. It was a half day workshop on July 16th during the Robotics Science and Systems (RSS) 2015 Conference. The Innovative Idea Baxter is a two armed manipulator robot which which is gaining popularity in the research and industrial communities. At […]

NIST GCTC 2016 Kick-Off Conference Registration Open

October 6th, 2015 / in Announcements, policy, Research News / by Helen Wright

The U.S. Department of Commerce‘s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) announced the next round of the Global City Teams Challenge (GCTC) at a White House Smart City Forum hosted by the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). See the White House Fact Sheet to read all the announcements made at the Forum. NIST announced that the kick-off conference for the next round of the Global City Teams Challenge will take place November 12-13, 2015 at NIST’s Campus in Gaithersburg, Maryland. Registration for the conference is now open. Please use this link to register. There is no registration fee. Pre-registration is required and closes November 5, 2015. The draft agenda can […]

Samsung Opens Devices to Internet of Things

October 5th, 2015 / in Announcements / by Khari Douglas

Samsung recently announced that it will allow more of its products to interact with its competitors’. Starting with this year’s Gear S2, a smart watch, all future devices will be able to connect with any smartphone running Google Inc’s Android operating system 4.4 and higher. Prior to this, Samsung’s smart watches required a Samsung smartphone. This business decision is part of the larger trend of the growing importance of the Internet of Things (IoT). Internet of Things is a catch-all term to describe the network of physical objects or “things” embedded with electronics, software, sensors, and network connectivity, which enable these objects to collect and exchange data. This includes devices such […]

Rise of Concerns About AI: Reflection and Directions

October 1st, 2015 / in research horizons, robotics / by Khari Douglas

Tom Dietterich and Eric Horvitz, the current and former president of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), respectively, have co-authored a CACM Viewpoint on the Rise of Concerns of AI: Reflection and Directions, now openly available in the October issue of CACM. Tom Dietterich is the Distinguished Professor and Director of Intelligent Systems at Oregon State’s School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Eric Horvitz is the Distinguished Scientist & Managing Director at Microsoft Research and former CCC Council Member. Drs. Dietterich and Horvitz reflect about the recent rise of anxieties about AI in public discussions and media. They discuss the realities about progress in AI and carefully elucidate several different categories of […]

Theoretical Foundations for Social Computing Workshop

September 30th, 2015 / in CCC, workshop reports / by Khari Douglas

The following is a special contribution to this blog by Jenn Wortman Vaughan, a senior researcher at Microsoft Research.   Social computing encompasses the mechanisms through which people interact with computational systems like crowdsourcing markets, ranking and recommendation systems, online prediction markets, citizen science projects, and collaboratively edited wikis. Humans are active participants in these systems, making choices that determine the systems’ input, and therefore output. The output of these systems can be viewed as a joint computation between humans and machines, and can be richer than what either could produce alone. Social computing is blossoming into a rich research area, with contributions from diverse disciplines including computer science, economics, […]

CCC Whitepaper- Systems Computing Challenges in the Internet of Things

September 28th, 2015 / in Announcements, research horizons, Research News / by Helen Wright

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Computing in the Physical World Task Force has just released a community whitepaper on Systems Computing Challenges in the Internet of Things. The Task Force, lead by CCC Council Member Ben Zorn from Microsoft Research, is looking at core research challenges that the Internet of Things (IoT) presents. This whitepaper highlights these challenges and provides recommendations that will help address inadequacies in existing systems, practices, tools, and policies. The recommendations are summarized below: Invest in research to facilitate the construction, deployment, and automated analysis of multi-component systems with complex and dynamic dependences. IoT systems by their nature will have dynamic membership and operate in unknown and unpredictable environments that include, […]