Ongoing CCC Activities
In the chart below you can check the status of ongoing white papers, reports, and workshops.
| Title | Status |
| CRA and CCC announce the 2021 CIFellows | This past spring, the Computing Research Association (CRA) and its Computing Community Consortium (CCC) announced funding for a cohort of Computing Innovation Fellows (CIFellows) for 2021, with strong support from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The program sponsors two-year postdoctoral research positions in computing, as well as career development and cohort building activities, to provide a career-enhancing bridge experience for recent Ph.D. graduates. The program aims to address the continued disruption in hiring practices at academic institutions due to COVID-19. This effort was inspired by the CRA/CCC’s NSF-funded Computing Innovation Fellows Programs with cohorts starting 2009, 2010, and 2011, CRA’s Best Practices Memo on Computer Science Postdocs, and the Computing Innovation Fellows 2020 Project. This cohort is comprised of 69 diverse researchers covering a broad range of areas in computing. The 2021 class of CIFellows is 52% women, come from 49 universities, and will be beginning their CIFellowships at 48 different universities. You can find out more about each CIFellow and the program here. |
| Artificial Intelligence / Operations Research Workshop | On September 23-24th, 2021 the Computing Community Consortium (CCC), the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) and ACM SIGAI held a joint visioning workshop on fusing Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Operations Research (OR). This workshop focused on exploiting the synergies of the AI and OR communities to transform decision making. The goal of this workshop was to establish a joint strategic vision for AI/OR that will maximize the societal impact of AI and OR in a world that is bound to undergo significant changes due to the COVID-19 pandemic, widening inequalities, and challenges in resilience and sustainability in the food-water-energy nexus. Follow-up workshops are being planned. A workshop report out is available here. |
| CCC Hybrid Workshop on Best Practices for Hybrid Workshops | The 2020 pandemic has catalyzed the transition to remote work but even prior to the pandemic, supported by new technologies (faster Internet connections, powerful end-user computing and communication devices, cloud applications, etc.), there has been a slow and steady move to a distributed and remote workforce. Increasingly, in many sectors people can literally work from anywhere thanks to the advances in computing and communications. Some of the scenarios that have become very familiar to many in the last decade include:
Even with the technological advances and adoption of remote work, there are some serious challenges that remain. In particular, hybrid environments in which there are clusters of participants who are co-located physically while others are distributed across the world, are far from perfect. Hybrid environments present both technological and social challenges, including inequity issues across a number of dimensions. We believe our future is hybrid. Towards that end, the CCC held a visioning activity on the technical, social and equity challenges that hybrid environments present October 14-15, 2021. A workshop report is in progress. |
| CRA and CCC release the 2020 CRA Quadrennial Papers | Every four years the Computing Research Association, through its subcommittees, publishes a series of white papers called Quadrennial Papers that explore areas and issues around computing research with potential to address national priorities. The white papers attempt to portray a comprehensive picture of the computing research field detailing potential research directions, challenges, and recommendations for policymakers and the computing research community. Our 2020 Quadrennial Papers cover five thematic areas: Core Computer Science, Broad Computing, Socio-Technical Computing, Diversity & Education, and Artificial Intelligence. Read the white papers here. |
| AI Working Group | The Artificial Intelligence Working Group has generated an AI Roadmap. Lead by Yolanda Gil (University of Southern California and President-Elect of AAAI) and Bart Selman (Cornell University), this new effort is in support of the Administrations’ efforts in this area, and brought together academic and industrial researchers and federal agency representatives to help chart a course for needed research in AI, through a series of workshops in the Fall of 2018, resulting in a Roadmap that was released in the summer of 2019. The final Roadmap is now available here. Learn more about the process to create the roadmap here. |
| Reversible Computing Workshop | The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) held a virtual workshop the week of Oct. 5-9 to address the physics & engineering challenges in adiabatic/ reversible classical computing. This workshop gathered the research community in this field to lay a common foundation of existing state-of-the-art knowledge. A comprehensive workshop report is now in progress. |
| NAE/CCC Workshop on the Role of Robotics in Infectious Disease Crises workshop | The CCC and National Academy of Engineering (NAE) co-sponsored a virtual workshop to study the role of robotic systems in infectious disease crises. It was held on July 9-10th, 2020 and a workshop report is now available here.
The report briefly 1) identifies key challenges faced by health care responders and the general population; 2) examines robotic/technological responses to these challenges; 3) identifies key research/knowledge barriers that need to be addressed in developing effective, scalable solutions; 4) identifies workforce training, regulatory, and infrastructure needs that should be addressed in order to enable rapid deployment of these systems; and 5) suggests follow-on steps to more fully develop and implement this strategy. A workshop report was released in October 2020. Read it here. |
| Code 8.7: Using Computation Science and AI to End Modern Slavery | On February 19-20, 2019, the CCC co-sponsored the Code 8.7: Using Computation Science and AI to End Modern Slavery conference with the United Nations University Centre for Policy Research, The Alan Turing Institute, Tech Against Trafficking, University of Nottingham Rights Lab, and Arizona State University Global Security Initiative. The two-day conference brought together the computational research and artificial intelligence (AI) communities together with those working to achieve Target 8.7 of the Sustainable Development Goals.With Target 8.7, 193 countries agreed to take immediate and effective measures to end forced labour, modern slavery and human trafficking by 2030, and the worst forms of child labour by 2025. You can stream the recordings of the conference on the Delta 8.7 Facebook page. A podcast episode about the conference is available for streaming here.
On March 3-4, 2020, the CCC and Code 8.7 held a workshop on Applying AI in the Fight Against Modern Slavery in Washington, DC. Session topics included self-aware learning, meaningful interaction with AI systems, integrated intelligence, open AI platforms and resources, and computational techniques designed to support the sharing of highly sensitive data while at the same time providing strong privacy guarantees. A workshop report was released in June 2021 — read it here. |
For more information about ongoing CCC activities contact Director Ann Drobnis at adrobnis [at] cra.org.
