Contributions to this post were provided by CCC Council member Nadya Bliss, Solon Barocas, Nick Diakopoulos, and Kelly Jin. Every few weeks we have been highlighting different panels from the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Symposium on Computing Research: Addressing National Priorities and Societal Needs. This week we are looking at the Data, Algorithms, and Fairness panel. This panel looked at how data-driven and algorithmic decision-making increasingly determines how businesses target advertisements to consumers, how police departments monitor individuals or groups, how banks decide who gets a loan and who does not, how employers hire, how colleges and universities make admissions and financial aid decisions, and much more. As data-driven decisions […]

Daily headlines bemoan the lack of secure systems and this past year witnessed numerous breaches leading to the disclosure of private information. The failure of these commercial systems has dominated much of the discourse around security and privacy. However, the secure collection and transmission of information and the judicious use of private data is fundamental to the core of our society beyond commerce. It underlies the basic processes of governance and civic participation. Almost a decade ago, computing researchers developed a mathematical theory called differential privacy, which protects information about individuals when analyzing groups of people. Differential privacy is now deployed in the commercial space and used by US federal […]

While wearable computing might seem like a new thing, it has been a part of our imagination since 1945 when Vannevar Bush headed the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development and envisioned the head-mounted camera that a scientist could wear while doing experiments. This example and others were given by plenary speaker and Contextual Computing Group Professor Thad Starner from Georgia Tech at the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Symposium on Computing Research: Addressing National Priorities and Societal Needs. Microdisplays, networking, and sensing all came together in 2010 and suddenly the field of wearable computing was no longer imaginary but real. The CCC Symposium was held on October 23-24, 2017 in Washington, […]

Contributions to this post were provided by CCC Chair Beth Mynatt, CCC Executive Council Member Daniel Lopresti, and the participants from the Intelligent Infrastructure for our Cities and Communities Panel.  Recently the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) posted an overview blog about our recent 2017 Symposium on Addressing National Priorities and Societal Needs. Over the next few weeks, we will highlight each panel session on the blog. This week we are highlighting the Intelligent Infrastructure for Our Cities and Communities Panel. The plenary speaker, Director of the National Incident Management Systems and Advanced Technologies (NIMSAT) Institute Michael Dunaway from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, presented on the Blueprint for Current […]

The speaker and poster videos from the 2017 Computing Research Symposium on Addressing National Priorities and Societal Needs are now available!  The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) has hosted dozens of research visioning workshops to imagine, discuss, and debate the future of computing and its role in addressing societal needs. The second CCC Computing Research Symposium brought these topics into a program designed to illuminate current and future trends in computing and the potential for computing to address national challenges. See the videos from the Symposium here. Poster presenters at the Symposium included early career faculty members, post-docs, and graduate students from many fields of computer science. There were a total of […]

CCC Chair Beth Mynatt has contributed to this blog. As computing has grown even more essential to day to day life, the capacity of computing research to effect societal change and address the needs of society has subsequently increased. In convening the Computing Research Symposium, our goal was to grow awareness and enthusiasm for the role that computing research plays in addressing timely and critical societal needs. How can we use artificial intelligence to amplify human abilities? How can intelligent infrastructure strengthen our communities? How do security and privacy promote democracy? How can big data and algorithms ensure fairness? To help answer these questions and more, we held the second […]