“Will Support Fundamental R&D That Transforms Ability to Forecast Pandemic-scale Events, Detect Outbreaks Early, and Respond Efficiently.” The COVID-19 pandemic had a devastating impact on the country, exposing our lack of preparedness and knowledge gaps in handling such events and understanding pathogens and disease emergence. NSF’s Predictive Intelligence for Pandemic Prevention (PIPP) initiative focuses on fundamental research and development activities needed to tackle grand challenges in infectious disease pandemics through prediction and prevention. The PIPP Phase II Centers Program builds upon Phase I Development Grant Program  to establish a network of centers or large-scale awards/investments that will support interdisciplinary team-based approaches to accelerate research and development activities in emerging infectious diseases and […]

The Coordinated Science Laboratory (CSL) just released a white paper reflecting ideas that were presented and discussed at the Symposium on Artificial Intelligence and Social Responsibility sponsored by the CSL at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, with co-sponsorship by the School of Information Sciences at the University. This symposium was the second of two symposia sponsored by CSL to celebrate its 70th anniversary.  Contemporary AI technologies are more powerful and pervasive than the original AI technologies created in university laboratories. While industry dominates AI today, universities can still play important roles. In this white paper, we recommend actions that universities should take to promote social responsibility in the development and […]

Pete Beckman will give a talk “Artificial Intelligence and the Digital Continuum: The Future of Linking Scientific Instruments and Edge Computing to Advanced Computation” as a part of the National Science Foundation CISE Distinguished Lecture Series. The lecture will be held on May 19th, 2022 at 11AM ET. Current technology, particularly artificial intelligence, enables huge amounts of data to be immediately collected, processed and archived. Beckman’s lecture will dive into SAGE, a new edge computing programming framework, how it will transform the digital continuum and upcoming developments in intelligent scientific infrastructure. Talk Abstract: No longer does a chasm exist between scientific instrumentation and advanced computation. From the sensor to the […]

Euronews just posted an article about the recent “deep-fake” video of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy calling on Ukrainian citizens to surrender. The fake video was viewed over 120,000 times on Twitter and is another example of how misinformation/disinformation is used to intentionally manipulate the public and can lead to extreme consequences. Deepfakes are videos edited using Artificial Intelligence and deep learning techniques to replicate the face and voice of a person to create a false narrative. Good deep fakes can be seemingly authentic and harder for the public to spot as false. “Videos made through such technologies are almost impossible to distinguish from the real ones,” the authority said in […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) recently released the Research Opportunities in Evidence-Based Elections white paper, written by Josh Benaloh (Microsoft Research), Philip B. Stark (University of California, Berkeley), Vanessa Teague (Australian National University), Melanie Volkamer (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology), and Dan Wallach (Rice University).  This white paper highlights the need for evidence-based elections, which can convince people that the results of elections are accurate, and suggests several technologies that could play a role in this, mostly focused on risk-limiting audits and end-to-end verifiability.  “A risk-limiting audit (RLA) is any procedure with a known minimum chance of correcting the reported electoral outcome if the reported electoral outcome is wrong—that is, if […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is pleased to announce the release of a new white paper,  A National Discovery Cloud: Preparing the US for Global Competitiveness in the New Era of 21st Century Digital Transformation, led by Ian Foster with significant support from Daniel Lopresti, Bill Gropp, Mark D. Hill, and Katie Schuman. The three “pillars,” as the paper calls them, of this new computation fabric include the “emergence of public cloud utilities as a new computing platform; the ability to extract information from enormous quantities of data via machine learning; and the emergence of computational simulation as a research method on par with experimental science.”  In order for the […]