Last Thursday, Politico held an AI Summit: Innovation and Governance as “a global leadership gathering of policymakers, business leaders and experts for solutions-driven conversations on the impact of AI on governments, industries and society.” Some notable government participants included Representative Will Hurd (Texas), France Córdova (National Science Foundation), and Stacy Dixon (Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity). In his opening remarks, Hurd said that we need to “double down on basic research.”  The problem with basic research is that “often times it is hard to understand the return on investment of basic research. People believe the government should have the same returns as venture capital, private equity, but that’s just not possible. […]

In July, Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council member Manuela Veloso will join JPMorgan Chase & Co. as head of artificial-intelligence research. She is currently the head of the Machine Learning Department at Carnegie Mellon University. From the J.P. Morgan Press Release: J.P. Morgan has already started to apply machine learning technology across its businesses and functions, and this expanded effort will be aimed at identifying further opportunities. A.I. is among the areas of investment within the bank’s annual technology budget of $10.8 billion, with more than half earmarked for new investments. Veloso is a Past President of AAAI (Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence), and the co-founder and a Past President of […]

CCC Council member Maja Mataric from the University of Southern California provided contributions to this post. If we train Artificial Intelligence (AI) to do our work for us it will still need to be periodically checked for errors and random noise. This detailed human oversight is not something we can skip. As AI has more and more power, it will also have more responsibility and the decisions it makes could be deadly if incorrect. We still have so much to learn about building machines that could potentially make life-altering decisions, and we cannot predict what kinds of serious engineering flaws will occur in the future. Michael I. Jordan from the […]

The Stanford One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence, AI100, launched in Fall 2014, is an endowed, long-range investigation of Artificial Intelligence (AI). It examines AI systems and the technological, ethical, and policy opportunities and dilemmas that they present to individuals, communities, and society. The AI100 Standing Committee (AI100SC) oversees the Study’s core activity: Designing and carrying out, on a five-year cycle, studies that assess the current state and future potential of AI-enabled computing systems. Resulting Study Panel Reports aim to inform and prompt action from diverse stakeholders as they navigate the promise and challenges that AI advancements raise for how people work, live, and play. The AI100SC, in preparation […]

While wearable computing might seem like a new thing, it has been a part of our imagination since 1945 when Vannevar Bush headed the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development and envisioned the head-mounted camera that a scientist could wear while doing experiments. This example and others were given by plenary speaker and Contextual Computing Group Professor Thad Starner from Georgia Tech at the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Symposium on Computing Research: Addressing National Priorities and Societal Needs. Microdisplays, networking, and sensing all came together in 2010 and suddenly the field of wearable computing was no longer imaginary but real. The CCC Symposium was held on October 23-24, 2017 in Washington, […]

The following is a Science Editorial from former CCC Council member and AI and Robotics Task Force Co-Chair Eric Horvitz, Head of  Microsoft Research Labs. He is also a past president of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) and cofounded the One Hundred Year Study on AI at Stanford. In an essay about his science fiction, Isaac Asimov reflected that “it became very common…to picture robots as dangerous devices that invariably destroyed their creators.” He rejected this view and formulated the “laws of robotics,” aimed at ensuring the safety and benevolence of robotic systems. Asimov’s stories about the relationship between people and robots were only a few years old […]