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 […]

The following Great Innovative Idea is from Tamraparni Dasu, Yaron Kanza, and Divesh Srivastava of AT&T Labs-Research. They were one of the Blue Sky Award winners at ACM SIGSPATIAL ’18 for their paper Geofences in the Sky: Herding Drones with Blockchains and 5G. The Idea Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), typically also referred to as drones, are gaining popularity and becoming ubiquitous. As the number of drones in the sky rapidly grows, managing the expected high-volume air traffic is becoming a critical challenge. It is essential to prevent collisions, and to protect the public from nuisances like noise or invasion of privacy, and shield from hazards like falling debris. Currently, in many countries drones are required to be within line of sight […]

The following Great Innovative Idea is from Prof. Dr. Heiko Paulheim, Chair for Data Science and Program Director of Mannheim Master in Data Science at the University of Mannheim. Paulheim was one of the CCC Blue Sky winners at the International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC) in October 2018 for his paper called, How Much is a Triple? The Idea Knowledge graphs, i.e., structured collections of knowledge in the form of a graph, are currently widely created and used, both commercially by major Internet companies such as Google and Facebook, as well as open source by researchers, such as DBpedia or Wikidata. While there is a larger body of work on how to create and refine those knowledge graphs, as well […]

The following Great Innovative Idea is from Mark Bernstein, the chief scientist at Eastgate Systems, Inc and Clare Hooper, an Independent Scholar in Vancouver, BC, Canada. Mark and Clare were winners at the recent Computing Community Consortium (CCC) sponsored Blue Sky Ideas Conference Track at the 29TH ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media, July 9-12, 2018 in Baltimore, MD. Their paper is called “A Villain’s Guide To Social Media And Web Science.” The Idea The great power and profitability of social media may not benefit the good and the bad alike; increasing evidence indicates that recent advances in data mining, social media, and web science all asymmetrically benefit the cruel, the dishonest, and the tyrant. Daily headlines reflect the appropriation and misuse of […]