The National Science Foundation (NSF) is currently accepting proposals for their National Artificial Intelligence (AI) Research Institutes program. By offering funding for AI Research Institutes the program seeks to strengthen the national AI research network and drive advancements in multi-disciplinary, multi-stakeholder research on large-scale, long-term research frontiers in AI.  Institutions of higher education (including community colleges) and non-profit, non-academic organizations are eligible to apply. Further details on eligibility and proposal requirements can be found on the NSF website. This round of institute proposals MUST focus on one of these high-priority themes:  Intelligent Agents for Next-Generation Cybersecurity  Neural and Cognitive Foundations of Artificial Intelligence  AI for Climate-Smart Agriculture and Forestry AI […]

A somewhat surprising theme emerged during the “Scientific Vocation Revisited – Can Future Discoveries be Made by Artificial Intelligence?” session at the 8th Heidelberg Laureate Forum (HLF). The session featured panelists Jeffrey A. Dean (Google Research), Harry Collins (Cardiff University) and Dafna Shahaf (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem); and, while they did discuss the potential impact of AI systems on the process of scientific discovery, they also kept reiterating the importance of human collaboration to making scientific advancements; particularly collaborations that occurs face-to-face. To open the session, moderator Volker Stollorz (Science Media Center Germany) asked Jeffrey Dean why private industry, such as Google and OpenAI, has been able to make […]

Khari Douglas will be covering the 8th Heidelberg Laureate Forum (HLF) on the CCC blog all week. Stay tuned and check out the HLF blog for more coverage of the event.  On the final day of the 2021 Heidelberg Laureate Forum a panel of laureates convened to discuss “Advances in Computer Science, Mathematics and Computing.” The panel included Vint Cerf (2004 Turing Award), Yoshua Bengio (2018 Turing Award), Alessio Figalli (2018 Fields Medal), Yann LeCun (2018 Turing Award), and Avi Wigderson (1994 Nevanlinna Prize and 2021 Abel Prize). The panel covered a lot of topics including the future of AI and advice for students pursuing their PhD’s. Among the highlights, Vint Cerf asked the panel if they are worried about AI and […]

Melanie Mitchell, Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council member and Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, was recently featured in a Scientific American article, ‘The Computer Scientist Training AI to Think with Analogies’. The article focused on explaining the importance of getting Artificial Intelligence (AI) to recognize and use analogies and included an interview on the topic from Quanta.  If and how AI can reach the same level of intelligence and independence as humans is an interdisciplinary problem that has plagued the field for many decades. Mitchell believes the key to success is getting these machines to think with analogies. The greatest advances in AI have focused on training to succeed […]

Gravitational waves, ‘ripples’ in space-time caused by some of the most violent and energetic processes in the Universe, were first predicted by Albert Einstein in 1916 in his general theory of relativity. Proof of their existence didn’t arrive until 1974. Then on September 14, 2015 the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) physically sensed the undulations in spacetime caused by gravitational waves generated by two colliding black holes 1.3 billion light-years away.  Now, Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council member Ian Foster (Argonne National Laboratory and University of Chicago) and his colleagues have published a paper in the journal Nature Astronomy showing that the hunt for gravitational waves across the universe can […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC), along with Code 8.7, is pleased to announce the release of the CCC / Code 8.7 Applying AI in the Fight Against Modern Slavery Workshop Report. This March 2020 workshop brought together over 50 members of the computing research community along with anti-slavery practitioners and survivors to lay out a research roadmap aimed at applying AI to the fight against human trafficking.  The primary goal was to explore ways in which long-range research in artificial intelligence (AI) could be applied to the fight against human trafficking. Building on the kickoff Code 8.7 conference held at the headquarters of the United Nations in February 2019, the […]