In Tuesday’s opening lecture at the Heidelberg Laureate Forum (HLF), Joseph Sifakis, 2007 Turing Award winner, discussed whether we can trust autonomous systems and considered the interplay between the trustworthiness of the system – the system’s ability to behave as expected despite mishaps – and the criticality of the task – the severity of the impact an error will have on the fulfillment of a task. Sifakis defined autonomy as the combination of five complementary functions – perception, reflection, goal management, planning, and self-awareness/adaption. The better a given system can manage these functions the higher the level of autonomy we say that it has, from 0 (no automation) to 5 (full automation, no […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) recently released the Research Opportunities in Sociotechnical Interventions for Health Disparity Reduction workshop report. The CCC’s 1.5 day Sociotechnical Interventions for Health Disparity Reduction workshop took place in April 2018 in New Orleans, co-located with the Society for Behavioral Medicine’s 39th Annual Meeting. This cross-disciplinary workshop, brought together leading researchers in computing, health informatics, and behavioral medicine to develop an integrative research agenda regarding sociotechnical interventions to reduce health disparities and improve the health of socio-economically disadvantaged populations. “Health disparities are differences in disease prevalence, incidence, morbidity and/or mortality in one group as compared to the general population. In Western countries, groups which experience disparities in health outcomes […]

I recently linked my child’s smart robot toy to the Internet. Did I feel a little strange about it? Yes. But was giving the robot the ability to play “Baby Shark” and dance to it while making my child laugh, worth it the risk? Yes, I thought, until I saw this… Recently, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) released an informational report called Considerations for Managing Internet of Things (IoT) Cybersecurity and Privacy Risks (NISTIR 8228). This is the first in a planned series of documents NIST is developing to help IoT users protect themselves, their data and their networks from potential compromise. Developed by the NIST Cybersecurity for IoT […]

A new episode of the Catalyzing Computing podcast is out now! In this episode Khari Douglas interviews Dr. Beth Mynatt, the Executive Director of Georgia Tech’s Institute for People and Technology (IPaT), a College of Computing Distinguished Professor, and the Director of the Everyday Computing Lab. Dr. Mynatt discusses her research into human computer interaction and her work at IPaT and the GVU center. Stream in the embedded player below or find the podcast on iTunes | Spotify | Stitcher | Google Play | Youtube. If you listen to the podcast, please take a moment to complete this listener survey – this survey will help us learn more about you and better tailor the show to the interests of our listeners. https://soundcloud.com/compcomcon/interview-with-beth-mynatt-part-1  

The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) has announced it’s 2018 Prize in Computing award to Shwetak Patel, of the University of Washington and Google and a Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council Member.  The ACM Prize in Computing is their second most prestigious award in all of computing (after the Turing Award – known as the Nobel Prize in Computing).  Patel is the recipient of the 2018 ACM Prize in Computing for contributions to creative and practical sensing systems for sustainability and health.  In just a decade, he has had incredible impact in the applications of AI and sensing in two broad areas – developing methods for disaggregating energy and water […]

This blog post contains contributions from an upcoming special issue of Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association In April 2018, the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) held a visioning workshop on Sociotechnical Interventions for Health Disparity Reduction. The workshop brought together leading researchers from computing, health informatics, behavioral medicine, and health disparities to develop an integrative research agenda that will advance sociotechnical interventions capable of reducing health disparities and improving the health outcomes of socio-economically disadvantaged populations. Four main themes were addressed during the course of the workshop: Theory to Design and Implementation: “How do researchers appropriately identify and map theory to design, implementation, and evaluation?” Sociotechnical System Blackboxes: “How […]