In honor of National Robotics Week, the Computing Community Consortium is releasing a mid-cycle update to the US National Robotics Roadmap. The US National Robotics Roadmap is updated every four years. Since the last update in September 2020, the world has changed significantly. The COVID pandemic has slowed, there is another administration in Washington, the National Robotics Initiative has officially ended, and the political climate for international trade is constantly changing. Given all these aspects, the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is publishing a minor revision of the roadmap before the next regular update in 2024. In November, the CCC published a call for contributions and input from the community. In […]

Scientists at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute (WHOI) have developed robotic buoys located 20 miles off of the coast of Martha’s Vineyard, MA, which are used to detect nearby whales in near real-time. These buoys listen to whale songs using underwater microphones, and compile these songs into spectrograms, or “pitch tracks” which resemble notes on sheet music. The spectrograms are then sent to on-shore servers, where Artificial Intelligence (AI) is used to compare these recordings to existing libraries of whale songs, to identify the species of whale. This data is then examined by human analysts and the detected species and number of whales are recorded in a public database and […]

As further advancements in Artificial Intelligence are made, automated processes and robotics are becoming a ubiquitous entity in the workforce. As a result, there is a growing concern among the public that robots will replace humans and cause a massive job shortage. The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) organized the “Robotics: Empowering not Replacing People” scientific session at the 2022 American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Annual Meeting in February to address this concern in the public perception. The panel moderated by CCC Council Member, Maria Gini (University of Minnesota, Twin Cities) and featuring Henrik Christensen (University of California, San Diego), Michelle Johnson (University of Pennsylvania) and Julie Shah […]

Chad Jenkins, CCC Council Member, Professor of Computer Science and Engineering and Associate Director of the Robotics Institute at the University of Michigan will be featured as a part of the National Science Foundation’s Distinguished Lecture Series on March 3rd from 11am-12:30pm EDT.  Jenkins earned his B.S. in Computer Science and Mathematics at Alma College (1996), M.S. in Computer Science at Georgia Tech (1998), and Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Southern California (2003). He previously served on the faculty of Brown University in Computer Science (2004-15). His research addresses problems in interactive robotics and human-robot interaction, primarily focused on mobile manipulation, robot perception, and robot learning from […]

Bayer, the pharmaceutical company that owns big name brands such as Aspirin, Aleve, Midol, Cenesten and Iberogast, recently partnered with Ada Health, an AI-based assessment platform. This free app uses an AI chat robot to collect information on symptoms, patient history and other user targeted questions to generate data-driven suggestions for next steps and proper care. “Ada’s technology is based on a custom-built reasoning engine and a highly comprehensive medical knowledge base, covering thousands of conditions. In fact, in a recent vignettes study testing the eight most popular online symptom assessment apps, Ada was proven to have the most comprehensive condition coverage, providing a condition suggestion 99% of the time, […]

On behalf of the National Science and Technology Council’s Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence, the Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) National Coordination Office has released a Request for Information (RFI) on updates to the 2016 National Artificial Intelligence Research and Development Strategic Plan. The 2016 National Artificial Intelligence Research & Development Strategic Plan focused on research areas that industry is considered unlikely to address and identified 7 strategies for Federally-funded AI research: Strategy 1: Make long-term investments in AI research. Prioritize investments in the next generation of AI that will drive discovery and insight and enable the United States to remain a world leader in AI. Strategy 2: Develop […]