The following is a guest blog by Vasant G Honavar, a Computing Community Consortium (CCC) council member and a Pennsylvania State University professor. The emergence of “big data” offers unprecedented opportunities for not only accelerating scientific advances but also enabling new modes of discovery. Some have gone so far as to suggest that “big data” makes the scientific method that has characterized natural science since the 17th century, consisting of systematic observation, measurement, and experiment, and the formulation, testing, and modification of hypotheses, obsolete. Nothing could be farther from truth.   The reality is that, in many disciplines, the emergence of big data exacerbates the gap between our ability to acquire, store, […]

The Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) just released a Request For Information (RFI) on Artificial Intelligence. Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies offer great promise for creating new and innovative products, growing the economy, and advancing national priorities in areas such as education, mental and physical health, addressing climate change, and more. Like any transformative technology, however, AI carries risks and presents complex policy challenges along a number of different fronts. The Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) is interested in developing a view of AI across all sectors for the purpose of recommending directions for research and determining challenges and opportunities in this field. The views of the […]

Imagine diagnosing a hospital patient with septicemia 25 hours before the onset of sepsis shock, dispatching the right police officer to de-escalate a situation, or increasing agricultural productivity based on weather knowledge where few weather stations exist. These scenarios are not simply dreams, but thanks to artificial intelligence (AI) research are actually happening in the world today and are having a positive impact on societies across the globe. Interest in artificial intelligence has been rapidly increasing in recent years, often with a focus on the flashy robot or computer that can speak responses, but the practical applications have a major societal impact and are often overlooked. AI has been successfully applied to societal […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC), White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), and Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), are co-sponsoring a public workshop on Artificial Intelligence for Social Good on June 7th, 2016 in Washington, DC. There has been a dramatically increasing interest in Artificial Intelligence (AI) in recent years. AI has been successfully applied to societal challenge problems and it has a great potential to provide tremendous social good in the future. In this workshop, we will discuss the successful deployments and the potential use of AI in various topics that are essential for social good, including but not limited to urban computing, health, environmental sustainability, and public […]

The organizing committee for the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) sponsored Computer-Aided Personalized Education has released their workshop report. The workshop, held in November 2015, brought together over 50 researchers in the fields of education, computer science, human-computer interaction, and cognitive psychology to address the challenges and future directions of computing-based educational tools. This growing agenda in computing research includes formalizing tasks such as assessment and feedback as computational problems, developing algorithmic tools to solve resulting problems at scale, and incorporating these tools effectively in learning environments. The report examines emerging trends, such as logical reasoning, machine learning, student-computer interaction, and learning science in order to come up with a research […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is proud to announce a White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), and CCC co-sponsored public workshop on Artificial Intelligence for Social Good on June 7th, 2016 in Washington, DC. There has been a dramatically increasing interest in Artificial Intelligence (AI) in recent years. AI has been successfully applied to societal challenge problems and it has a great potential to provide tremendous social good in the future. In this workshop, we will discuss the successful deployments and the potential use of AI in various topics that are essential for social good, including but not limited to urban computing, health, […]