The following is a letter to the community from Micaela S. Parker, Executive Director of the Academic Data Science Alliance (ADSA). ADSA was launched in May 2019 to provide an independent national resource network for academic data science leaders, practitioners, and educators to connect and exchange ideas, and to advance the uptake of data science best practices in higher education. Dear Colleagues, The Academic Data Science Alliance is working with partners to pull together data sets and data science resources related to the COVID-19 pandemic.  Initiated by conversations with Columbia, NYU, UC Berkeley, and the University of Washington, universities in three regions of the U.S. hit hard by the coronavirus, we invite the […]

The last decade has seen the increased use of machine learning and data science to make decisions—from figuring out which YouTube video to recommend to deciding whom to give a loan, automated decisions are now everywhere. However, as deployment of these decision-making systems has increased so too have concerns about the transparency of the component algorithms and the fairness of their outcomes. This topic was the subject of the New Approaches to Fairness in Automated Decision Making scientific session at the 2020 American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Annual meeting in Seattle, Washington one month ago. The session was moderated by Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Director Ann Schwartz Drobnis and included: Sampath […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) recently released the Algorithmic and Economic Perspectives on Fairness workshop report. It is the output of the CCC’s 1.5-day Economics and Fairness visioning workshop that took place in May 2019, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The workshop was organized by David C. Parkes (Harvard University, CCC Council) and Rakesh Vohra (University of Pennsylvania), with the support of the CCC’s Fairness and Accountability Task Force. It brought together computer science researchers with backgrounds in algorithmic decision-making, machine learning, and data science with policy makers, legal experts, economists, and business leaders to discuss methods to ensure economic fairness in a data-driven world. The report highlights the current trends and uses of algorithmic […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) recently released the first episode of the “Catalyzing Computing” podcast, and episode 2 is available now. The podcast is hosted by CCC Program Associate Khari Douglas and features interviews with researchers and policy makers about their background and experiences in the computing community. The podcast will also offer recaps of visioning workshops and other events hosted by the CCC. If you want to learn about some of the computing community’s most influential members or keep tabs on the latest areas of interest then, this is the podcast for you! The second episode of Catalyzing Computing is part 2 of the interview with CCC Council Member […]

The Computing Research Association’s Computing Community Consortium (CCC) mission is broad. Our mission is to catalyze the computing research community and enable the pursuit of innovative, high-impact research. CCC conducts activities that strengthen the research community, articulate compelling research visions, and align those visions with pressing national and global challenges. As a consequence, material on the CCC web site spans many areas of IT such as Intelligent Infrastructure, Privacy and Fairness, Artificial Intelligence, and Cybersecurity. Most IT professionals, however, only focus on one of these areas in order to make deep connections. Until recently, users had to know exactly what to search for in order to find material in their focus area. For this […]

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) recently released the following letter to the community announcing its Strategic Plan for Data Science.  Dear Colleagues, The National Institutes of Health (NIH) released its first-ever Strategic Plan for Data Science to capitalize on the opportunities presented by advances in data science.  The plan describes NIH’s overarching goals, strategic objectives, and implementation tactics for promoting the modernization of the NIH-funded biomedical data science ecosystem. We are grateful for the input from the community and the public received from the Request for Information, which was incorporated into the final plan. Over the course of the next year, NIH will begin implementing its strategy, with some elements of the […]