The following Great Innovative Idea is from David H. Ackley from the University of New Mexico. His Indefinite Scalability for Living Computation paper was one of the winners at the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) sponsored Blue Sky Ideas Track Competition at the 30th Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-16), February 12-17, 2016 in Phoenix, Arizona. The Innovative Idea Traditional digital computers employ hardware determinism, meaning that running a program twice on the same inputs is guaranteed to produce the same outputs. Determinism greatly simplifies programming the machine, but ultimately limits its size—and encourages the development of software that is highly efficient, but also extremely fragile, and all but impossible to keep secure. The blue sky idea is […]

The following Great Innovative Idea is from Philip J. Guo, Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Rochester. Philip recently attended the Computing Community Consortium Computer-Aided Personalized Education Workshop in Washington, DC and presented his work on Python Tutor. The Innovative Idea One of the most fundamental skills to develop when learning computer programming is forming a mental model of how the computer executes a piece of code step-by-step. Instructors often draw diagrams to help learners form these mental models. But what if no instructor is available? I have developed a Web-based tool called Python Tutor (http://pythontutor.com/) that can automatically draw these diagrams for learners. As its […]

  The following Great Innovative Idea is from Sergey Levine, Chelsea Finn, Trevor Darrell, and Pieter Abbeel in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences (EECS) Department at the University of California Berkeley. Their End-to-End Training of Deep Visuomotor Policies paper was one of the winners at the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) sponsored Blue Sky Ideas Track Competition at the AAAI-RSS Special Workshop on the 50th Anniversary of Shakey: The Role of AI to Harmonize Robots and Humans in Rome, Italy. It was a half day workshop on July 16th during the Robotics Science and Systems (RSS) 2015 Conference. The Innovative Idea Techniques like reinforcement learning and optimal control offer the promise of automating robotic decision making by using […]

The following Great Innovative Idea is from Michela Milano at the University of Bologna-Italy and Pascal Van Hentenryck from NICTA Optimisation Research Group and the University of Michigan. Their Emerging Architectures for Global System Science paper was one of the winners at the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) sponsored Blue Sky Ideas Conference Track at the 29th Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-15), January 25-30, 2015 in Austin, Texas. The Innovative Idea Our society is organized around a number of (interdependent) global systems: Logistic and supply chains, health services, energy networks, financial markets, computer networks, and cities. Typically, people optimize these systems by considering sub-systems in isolation and ignoring aspects that cannot be modelled easily such […]

The following Great Innovative Idea is from Marc Palyart at the University of British Columbia, Gail C. Murphy at the Univeristy of British Columbia, Emerson Murphy-Hill at NC State University, and Xavier Blanc at Bordeaux University. Their Speculative Reprogramming paper won third place at the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) sponsored Blue Sky Ideas Conference Track series at the 22nd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE), November 16-22, 2014 in Hong Kong. The Innovative Idea Software programming today is largely a flat-line activity.  Although a software developer implementing a design makes many choices, such as which library to use, which data structures to use and so on, these choices are seldom captured; the code committed to the repository is typically the final end choice. To support programming as […]

The following Great Innovative Idea is from Sebastian Elbaum, Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and David S. Rosenblum, Dean of the School of Computing at the National University of Singapore. Their paper Known Unknowns: Testing in the Presence of Uncertainty won second place at the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) sponsored Blue Sky Ideas Conference Track series at the 22nd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE), November 16-22, 2014 in Hong Kong. The Innovative Idea Uncertainty is present in most systems we build today, whether introduced by human decisions, machine learning algorithms, external libraries, or sensing variability. This uncertainty leads to occasional misbehavior or incorrect output that is deemed to be acceptable. In the […]