The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) has announced it’s 2018 Prize in Computing award to Shwetak Patel, of the University of Washington and Google and a Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council Member.  The ACM Prize in Computing is their second most prestigious award in all of computing (after the Turing Award – known as the Nobel Prize in Computing).  Patel is the recipient of the 2018 ACM Prize in Computing for contributions to creative and practical sensing systems for sustainability and health.  In just a decade, he has had incredible impact in the applications of AI and sensing in two broad areas – developing methods for disaggregating energy and water […]

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has released a Dear Colleague Letter (DCL) calling for proposals “to the Operations Engineering program into operational methods to discover, disrupt and disable illicit supply networks,” such as those that enable human trafficking and the sale of illegal weapons, drugs, and animals. While this call is lead by the NSF’s Engineering Directorate, proposals will require expertise in social and computational science and the DCL includes NSF’s Directorates for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) and Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences (SBE). Related to this fight against illicit supply networks, the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) recently cosponsored the Code 8.7: Using Computation Science and AI to […]

On February 19-20, 2019 the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) co-sponsored the Code 8.7: Using Computation Science and AI to End Modern Slavery with the United Nations University Centre for Policy Research, The Alan Turing Institute, Tech Against Trafficking, University of Nottingham Rights Lab, and Arizona State University Global Security Initiative. Code 8.7 brought together computer science researchers and technologists with policy researchers, law enforcement officials, and activists involved in the fight against human trafficking. Code 8.7 was named after Target 8.7 of the Sustainable Development Goals. With Target 8.7, 193 countries agreed to take immediate and effective measures to end forced labor, modern slavery, and human trafficking by 2030, and the worst forms of child […]

The Computing Community Consortium’s (CCC) Industry Working Group has released their Evolving Academia/Industry Relations in Computing Research: Interim Report. In 2015, the CCC sponsored an industry round table that produced the report “The Future of Computing Research: Industry-Academic Collaborations”. Since then, several important trends in computing research have emerged such as the dramatic increase in undergraduate computer science enrollment, the increased availability of information technology, and the rising level of interactions between professors and companies, which has led to the sharing of critical industry resources (such as cloud computing and data). This report considers how these trends impact the interaction between academia and industry in computing fields. The interim report […]

The following blog post is from CCC Chair Mark D. Hill of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Kelvin Droegemeier recently gave his first speech as the Head of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) at the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences (AAAS) 2019 annual meeting in Washington, DC. He is a meteorologist who has done substantial computer modeling and the first non-Physicist to lead OSTP. See the 42-minute video of his talk here. He called for all of us to continue our quest regarding Science’s “Endless Frontier” from Vannevar Bush’s eponymous 1945 report, beginning with a “portfolio analysis” of the US’s tremendous scientific strengths. For those of us […]

Last week I shared my interview with Thermodynamic Computing workshop organizers, Tom Conte (Georgia Tech) and Todd Hylton (UC San Diego) and workshop participant Christof Teuscher in What is Thermodynamic Computing? Part 1. Part 2 of What is Thermodynamic Computing? is now available for streaming or download on Soundcloud (embed below), or you find it on iTunes | Spotify | Stitcher | Google Play. In this episode I interview workshop organizer, Natesh Ganesh, a PhD student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst who is interested in the physical limits to computing, brain inspired hardware, non-equilibrium thermodynamics, and emergence of intelligence in self-organized systems. He was awarded the best paper award at IEEE ICRC’17 for the paper  A Thermodynamic Treatment of Intelligent Systems. I also speak with workshop participant […]