The NSF Workshop on Sustainable Computing for Sustainability has just released a virtual registration link to attend the workshop remotely on April 16-17, 2024. This workshop, which the CCC’s own Chandra Krintz is on the steering committee for, seeks to identify open challenges in how to harness computing to tackle sustainability problems, and in ensuring that computing accounts for sustainability in its own development and operation.   Due to space limitations, the workshop will follow a hybrid format with approximately 100 in-person attendees at the National Science Foundation’s headquarters in Alexandria, VA, and remote participation feasible through a zoom webinar. Please use this link to register to attend remotely. The deadline […]

CCC supported three scientific sessions at this year’s AAAS Annual Conference, and in case you weren’t able to attend in person, we will be recapping each session. This week, we will summarize the highlights of the session, “Generative AI in Science: Promises and Pitfalls.” In Part Three, we summarize the presentation by Dr. Duncan Watson-Parris, assistant professor at Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute at UC San Diego.   Following Dr. Markus Buehler’s presentation on generative AI in mechanobiology, Dr. Watson-Parris turned the audience’s attention to generative AI applications in the climate sciences. He began by outlining the difference between climate and weather. Weather refers to […]

The Computing Community Consortium just held a two-part workshop, “Building Resilience to Climate Driven Extreme Events with Computing Innovations”. The workshops were sponsored by the National Science Foundation’s new Directorate for Technology, Innovation and Partnership (TIP). TIP has a major initiative “Convergence Accelerator” that funds programs seeking to solve societal challenges through convergence research and innovation. The goal is to encourage interdisciplinary work, “merging ideas, approaches and technologies from a wide and diverse range of sectors and expertise.” The first workshop in the series was held in-person in Denver, Colorado on October 27-28th, 2022. The goal was to frame the research focus for impact areas (application domains), computing research building […]

The Computing Community Consortium would like to congratulate the Vice Chair of the CCC, Dr. Nadya Bliss, on her appointment to the National Academies’ Climate Security Roundtable.    In January of 2021, Congress voted to direct the National Academies to establish the Climate Security Roundtable, which will provide expert support to the federal Climate Security Advisory Council (CSAC) in foreseeing and preventing climate security crises from escalating into issues of national security. This roundtable will facilitate conversations and collaboration surrounding a number of topics, including dissemination of relevant climate change data and information, discussion of understudied risks associated with climate change, improvements to existing climate change models and simulations, and […]

Climate change is a hot topic that has ongoing conversations in every field imaginable, computer science being no exception. Researchers and scientists are increasingly concerned about the negative impacts computing has on the environment. While car exhaust, carbon footprints from factories and other obvious forms of pollution take the forefront in people’s minds – everyday actions done on the computer such as downloading a movie, flipping through TikTok or streaming YouTube videos uses a considerable amount of energy. In addition, technology such as laptops and phones contain a lot of toxic chemicals and heavy metals that infiltrate the environments upon disposal. Computer scientists are starting to rethink the way we […]

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 […]