The following great innovative idea is from Yiqun Xie, who is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Minnesota.  Xie along with his advisor and former Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council member McKnight Distinguished Professor Shashi Shekhar, Professor Richard Feiock of Florida State University and Professor Joseph Knight from the Department of Forestry Resources at the University of Minnesota, received a Blue Sky Idea Award at the 27th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems. They were honored for their paper, “Revolutionizing Tree Management via Innovative Spatial Techniques.” The Idea Unawareness of tree locations and their spatial relationships with urban infrastructures have disturbed our communities with increasing frequency, scale and severity. For example, Emerald Ash Borer […]

The following great innovative idea is from Konstantin Todorov from the University of Montpellier and a researcher at the LIRMM laboratory within the FADO group. Todorov was one of the Blue Sky Awards at ISWC 2019 for his paper called Datasets First! A Bottom-up Data Linking Paradigm.  The Idea Data linking is understood as the task of establishing typed links between entities across different knowledge graphs via the help of automatic link discovery systems. We argue that the current generic approach to develop data linking solutions has reached its limits and suggest that a paradigm shift in the way we look onto this task needs to take place. We propose to enable the development of data-centric approaches for bottom-up […]

The following great innovative idea is from Mayank Kejriwal and Pedro Szekely from the University of Southern California. Kejriwal and Szekely were one of the Blue Sky Award winners at ISWC 2019 for their paper called Co-LOD: Continuous Space Linked Open Data. The Idea The Web has always been thought of as a collection of discrete elements; for example, the number of people with articles on Wikipedia, the number of likes for a post on Facebook, and so on. The collection of open, interlinked datasets (Linked Open Data) that forms the backbone of the Semantic Web is also discrete.  However, modern deep learning and Artificial intelligence methods operate in continuous spaces or in the realm of real numbers. […]

The following great innovative idea is from Ouri Wolfson, the Richard and Loan Hill Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and an Affiliate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. Ouri was one of the Blue Sky Award winners at ACM SIGSPATIAL ’18 for his paper called Understanding the Human Brain Via its Spatio-temporal Properties. The Idea The human brain is probably the most complex object in the universe, and also one of the least understood. For example, how the brain produces the mind and consciousness is a complete mystery. Nevertheless, the brain is amenable to measurements of various kinds that produce lots of data. It is […]

The following Great Innovative Idea is from Francesca Rossi of IBM Research and Nicholas Mattei of Tulane University. They were one of the Blue Sky Award winners at AAAI 2019 for their paper Building Ethically Bounded AI. The Idea The more AI agents are deployed in scenarios with possibly unexpected situations, the more they need to be flexible, adaptive, and creative in achieving the goal we have given them. Thus, a certain level of freedom to choose the best path to the goal is inherent in making AI robust and flexible enough. At the same time, however, the pervasive deployment of AI in our life, whether AI is autonomous or […]

The following Great Innovative Idea is from Barry Smyth, the Digital Chair of Computer Science at University College Dublin and the Director of the Insight Centre for Data Analytics. Dr. Smyth was one of the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Blue Sky Track Conference Winners at AAAI-19 for his paper Recommender Systems: A Healthy Obsession. The Idea The idea of using AI and machine learning to help people to train more effectively for, and race in, marathons, and other endurance events. Impact I believe that it has the potential to change how people exercise, by helping them to train more efficiently and more safely. Other Research I work in the area […]