The Climate Change AI (CCAI) organization, which is composed of volunteers from academia and industry who believe that tackling climate change requires concerted societal action in machine learning, has announced a new Call for Proposals: Climate Change AI Innovation Grants.  Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) can help support climate change mitigation and adaptation, as well as climate science, across many different areas, for example energy, agriculture, forestry, climate modeling, and disaster response (for a broader overview of the space, please refer to Climate Change AI’s interactive topic summaries and materials from previous events). However, impactful research and deployment have often been held back by a lack of data […]

Earlier this week the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which is the United Nations body for assessing the science related to climate change, released their Climate Change 2021- The Physical Science Basis Report. The report is sobering. We know that human activity is changing the climate in unprecedented and sometimes irreversible ways, but this recent report warns of increasingly extreme heatwaves, droughts and flooding, and a key temperature limit being broken in just over a decade. It shows how catastrophic the outlook will be if we don’t act now.  The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) has released a new whitepaper on Computing Research for the Climate Crisis, coauthored by Nadya […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Convergence of Data and Computing Task Force, led by CCC Council Members Vasant G. Honavar from Pennsylvania State University, Mark D. Hill from University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Katherine Yelick from University of California at Berkeley, has just released another community white paper called Accelerating Science: A Computing Research Agenda. This white paper seeks to articulate a research agenda for developing cognitive tools that can augment human intellect and partner with humans on the scientific process. The recent advances in sensing, measurement, storage and communication technologies and the resulting emergence of “big data” offer unprecedented opportunities for not only accelerating scientific advances, but also enabling new modes of discovery. However, there is a huge gap […]

The time is now for computer science education! With the shifting economy, educators are increasingly recognizing computer science as a new basic requirement. In his final State of the Union address, President Barack Obama said that “helping students learn to write computer code” is among his goals for the year ahead. Jim Kurose, the Assistant Director of the National Science Foundation (NSF) for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) released a letter to the community acknowledging the excitement in the community but also noting to “please stay tuned as the Administration announces new steps in the coming weeks to support efforts to expand access to computer science education across the Nation.” White House Office of Science Technology Policy U.S. Chief Technology […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Computing in the Physical World Task Force has just released another community whitepaper on Smart Communities Internet of Things.  The Task Force, led by CCC Council Member Ben Zorn from Microsoft Research and Shwetak Patel from University of Washington, is looking at core research challenges that the Internet of Things (IoT) presents. This whitepaper, led by Klara Nahnahrstedt from the University of Illinois at Urbana – Champaign, highlights the benefits and challenges of cyber-technologies within “Smart Cities”, especially the IoT for smart communities, which means considering the benefits and challenges of IoT cyber-technologies on joint smart cities physical infrastructures and their human stakeholders. Their recommendations are summarized below: There is a major […]

On October 20, as part of the rollout of the National Strategic Computing Initiative, the White House announced their nanotechnology-inspired grand challenge to develop transformational computing capabilities by combining innovations in multiple scientific disciplines. Create a new type of computer that can proactively interpret and learn from data, solve unfamiliar problems using what it has learned, and operate with the energy efficiency of the human brain. In support of this rollout, the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) has released a statement of support as well as a whitepaper on the Opportunities and Challenges for Next Generation Computing. This whitepaper articulates some opportunities and challenges for dramatic performance improvements of both personal to national […]