Congress recently passed the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, a bipartisan bill which includes $550 billion in new federal spending on infrastructure over five years. President Biden is scheduled to sign the bill into law today (November 13th).   While designed as a traditional infrastructure bill, an analysis of the legislation by the Computing Research Policy Blog found several sections that are of note to the research community and the computing research community specifically: A five-year, $100 million a year SMART grant program at the Department of Transportation (DOT); several intelligent transportation and smart communities pilot programs at DOT; a new ARPA program (ARPA-Infrastructure) at DOT; Division F, a large subsection […]

How can computing technology impact global health, particularly with regards to the COVID-19 pandemic? Shwetak Patel, 2018 ACM Prize in Computing winner and Computing Community Consortium (CCC) council member, addressed this question on the second day of the Virtual Heidelberg Laureate Forum (HLF) 2020. Patel, an entrepreneur and professor of computer science at the University of Washington, won the 2018 Prize for “contributions to creative and practical sensing systems for sustainability and health.” During his presentation, Patel highlighted a few of the use cases of computing technology on healthcare: for instance, AI has improved screening and diagnostic capabilities by reading X-rays and radiology scans and the ubiquity of mobile phones makes them a great […]