Significant contributions to this post were provided by Computing Community Consortium (CCC) council member Juliana Freire from NYU. When a new exciting discovery is announced in our field, can we trust it? How was it produced? What data and code was used? How accurate are the results? Can they be reproduced? Recently, Congress1 directed the National Science Foundation (NSF) to contract with the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NAS) to “undertake a study to assess reproducibility and replicability in scientific and engineering research and to provide findings and recommendations for improving rigor and transparency in research.” An interdisciplinary committee of fifteen members, including CCC Council Member Juliana Freire, […]

On October 24, 2018, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine‘s Forum on Aging, Disability, and Independence will host a workshop in Washington, DC that will explore the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) to foster a balance of safety and autonomy for older adults and people with disabilities who strive to live as independently as possible.  AI offers the possibility to greatly benefit Americans who are older than 65 or those who are living with a disability. AI systems present the potential for improving accessibility and transportation systems; increasing social connections; and lowering health care costs. However, there is a significant lack of evidence about the impact of such technologies, which points to a need […]

National Academy of Sciences’ Sackler Colloquium on Creativity and Collaboration: Revisiting Cybernetic Serendipity will be in Washington, DC at the National Academy of Sciences (2101 Constitution Avenue, NW Washington, District of Columbia 20418) on March 13-14, 2018. Our ambition is to redirect the history of ideas, restoring the Leonardo-like close linkage between art/design and science/engineering. We believe that internet-enabled collaborations can make more people more creative more of the time. 50 years ago in an era of political turmoil, the artistic response was captured in a famed exhibit on Cybernetic Serendipity that celebrated how individual artists could creatively transform computers into art machines. The rock star artists entranced 40,000 viewers with never-before seen images, […]

National Science Foundation (NSF) Assistant Director for the Directorate of Computer & Information Science & Engineering (CISE) James Kurose and Irene Qualters, Division Director for Advanced Cyberinfrastructure, have issued the following letter to the community to announce that the final report from the National Academies on Future Directions for NSF Advanced Computing Infrastructure to Support U.S. Science and Engineering in 2017-2020 is now available.  Dear Computing and Information Science and Engineering Community, It is our great pleasure to inform you that the final report from the National Academies on Future Directions for NSF Advanced Computing Infrastructure to Support U.S. Science and Engineering in 2017-2020 is now available for download at http://www.nap.edu/catalog/21886. This study was commissioned by CISE’s […]

Congratulations to Benjamin Recht, assistant professor of electrical engineering, computer science, and statistics at the University of California, Berkeley, for receiving the 2015 William O. Baker Award for Initiatives in Research in the field of statistics and machine learning. From the website: Recht is being honored for his significant contributions to the field of data science, an area of research that combines statistics (the analysis of large amounts of numerical data), computer science, and mathematics. A common problem in the modern world is that there is lots of data but it is usually incomplete. Recht’s work has been particularly valuable in a broad area of mathematics that uses assumptions to reconstruct data—matrix completion […]