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.

CCC Council Member Melanie E. Moses Article in Nautilus: How to Fix the Vaccine Rollout

March 2nd, 2021 / in CCC, COVID, research horizons, Research News / by Maddy Hunter

Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council Member, Professor of Computer Science at the University of New Mexico and External Faculty Member at the Santa Fe Institute, Melanie E. Moses, recently published an article in Nautilus titled, “How to Fix the Vaccine Rollout: A computational biologist charts a fair and efficient course for vaccine distribution.” A year after the onset of COVID-19, the development and approval of vaccines provides hope that the pandemic nightmare is nearing an end. With countries facing second or third waves and, in many places, cases hitting an all time high, vaccinating our most vulnerable populations as quickly as possible is essential. Unfortunately, until now, the vaccine rollout […]

Catalyzing Computing Podcast Episode 31 – Autonomous Flight and Landing on Mars with Behçet Açikmeşe (Part 1)

March 1st, 2021 / in Announcements, podcast / by Khari Douglas

A new episode of the Computing Community Consortium‘s (CCC) official podcast, Catalyzing Computing, is now available. In this episode, Khari Douglas (CCC Senior Program Associate) interviews Dr. Behçet Açikmeşe. Behçet was a technologist and a senior member of the Guidance and Control (G&C) Analysis Group at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) from 2003 to 2012 where he developed guidance, control, and estimation algorithms for formation-flying spacecraft and distributed networked systems, proximity operations around asteroids and comets, and planetary landing. He is currently a Professor in Aeronautics & Astronautics, as well as Electrical & Computer Engineering, at the University of Washington and a member of their Autonomous Controls Lab. In this episode, […]

Artificial Intelligence is Critical to National Security, Defense, U.S. Economy, and Worthy of Significant New Investment, Congressionally-chartered Commission Argues in Final Report

March 1st, 2021 / in AI, Announcements / by Helen Wright

The National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, a congressionally-chartered committee charged with reviewing AI and related technologies and making recommendations to address U.S. national security and defense needs, today released its final report, endorsing significant new investments in AI research, strategies for building the AI workforce, and guidance for using AI in warfare while upholding U.S. democratic values. The report is likely to inform policy activity around defense-related AI issues in Congress and at the Department of Defense over the next months and years. Computing Research Association (CRA) Government Affairs Director, Peter Harsha and Nadya T. Bliss, Executive Director of ASU’s Global Security Institute and Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Executive […]

Free Virtual Workshop on Assessing and Improving AI Trustworthiness: Current Contexts, Potential Paths

February 25th, 2021 / in AI, Announcements, research horizons, Research News / by Helen Wright

On March 3-4 from 12:00 PM to 5:00 PM ET, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) will convene “Assessing and Improving AI Trustworthiness: Current Contexts, Potential Paths,” a public workshop sponsored by the National Institute of Standards and Technology to help think through this interrelated set of challenges. This workshop will work to produce initial ideas for activities and collaborations by academia, industry, and the public sector to improve the assessment of trustworthiness of AI systems, and recommendations for NIST and similar public bodies. The notion of AI trustworthiness, comprising a wide array of attributes such as robustness, accuracy, fairness, explainability, and privacy, presents a complicated set […]

CCC Exec Council Member Nadya Bliss on Applying AI in the Fight Against Modern Slavery

February 24th, 2021 / in AI, Announcements, CCC, Privacy, research horizons, Research News, robotics, Security, workshop reports / by Helen Wright

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 […]

Cloud Access for NSF CISE Research

February 23rd, 2021 / in Announcements, NSF, policy, research horizons, Research News, robotics / by Helen Wright

An increasing number of National Science Foundation (NSF) Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) solicitations, including the CISE Core Programs (for which SMALL Projects do not have a submission deadline), are eligible for cloud access via the CloudBank portal to the AWS, Azure, GCP, and IBM clouds. These clouds offer enormous capacity and rich software stacks. Another plus: access through CloudBank is not subject to indirect cost. For further information: An AWS Public Sector Blog post by Deep Medhi (NSF) and Sanjay Padhi (AWS): https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/publicsector/simplifying-access-cloud-resources-researchers-cloudbank/ A webinar featuring Deep Medhi, Sanjay Padhi, and Mike Norman (UCSD; PI of NSF’s CloudBank effort): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtdhxFOrIcM&feature=youtu.be CloudBank: https://www.cloudbank.org/ July 2018 workshop report “Enabling […]