The following was adapted from this Santa Fe blog post.  At a recent presentation at the Science Writers 2020 conference, Joshua Garland and Mirta Galesic of the Santa Fe Institute presented the first large-scale analysis of tens of millions of instances of hate and counter-hate speech on Twitter. Their findings suggest that organized movements to counteract hate speech on social media are more effective than striking out on one’s own. “I’ve seen this big shift in civil discourse in the last two or three years towards being much more hateful and much more polarized,” says Garland, a mathematician and Applied Complexity Fellow at SFI. “So, for me, an interesting question […]

The following has been reposted from the CRA Bulletin.   Today the Computing Research Association (CRA) released the first of more than a dozen planned white papers produced through its subcommittees, exploring areas and issues around computing research with the potential to address national priorities over the next four years. Called Quadrennial Papers, the white papers attempt to portray a broad picture of computing research detailing potential research directions, challenges, and recommendations for policymakers and the computing research community. The release of the 2020 Quadrennial Papers covers five thematic areas: Core Computer Science, Broad Computing, Socio-Technical Computing, Artificial Intelligence, and Diversity & Education.  CRA today released the first set of four […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) has released a white paper titled Evolving Methods for Evaluating and Disseminating Computing Research. This white paper was written by Future of the Research Enterprise (FRE) task force members Ben Zorn (Microsoft Research), Tom Conte (Georgia Tech), Keith Marzullo (University of Maryland), and Suresh Venkatasubramanian (University of Utah).  The FRE task force was assembled in 2019 to study the evolution of the computing research ecosystem, including topics such as the impact of academia-industry relations, the peer review process, and the future of open source projects. Based on interviews with members of the computing research community, the task force wrote the Evolving Methods for Evaluating and […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) has been working hard on various white papers over the past couple of months and slowly releasing them. You can see all of them here. Today, we highlight another paper, called Big Data, Data Science, and Civil Rights by Solon Barocas, Elizabeth Bradley, Vasant Honavar, and Foster Provost. Government, academia, and the private sector have increasingly recognized that the use of big data and data science in decisions has important implications for civil rights. However, a coherent research agenda for addressing these topics is only beginning to emerge and the need for such an agenda is critical and timely. Big data and data science have begun […]

The White House recently released their list of 100 examples of President Obama’s leadership in science, technology, and innovation. The list includes many computing related commitments such as supported millions of students with ConnectEd, created a new pipeline for well-paying tech jobs, and called for computer science education for all. The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) has contributed to many of these examples. #34 is the National Robotics Initiative (NRI). In June 2011, the Administration established the National Robotics Initiative to spur research and development in a variety of robotics applications, including healthcare, agriculture, manufacturing, space exploration, and national security. The CCC’s 2008 Robotics Roadmap was a key catalyst for the NRI and […]

In May, the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) commissioned members of the research community to generate white papers to help guide strategic thinking in autonomous systems in a number of different domain specific areas, including Aerial Earth Science, Construction, Defense, Disaster Management, Healthcare, Paths Towards Autonomy, Service Robots, and Transportation Systems. The CCC has released eight white papers. The Toward a Science of Autonomy for Physical Systems white paper frames both the opportunities and challenges posed by autonomous physical systems in general. We contend that, in most cases, the potential human and economic toll of not exploring and understanding automation science in a timely and thoughtful manner far outweighs the costs or risks. The associated […]