Tag Archive: CCC Blog
Items from the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Blog.
Recently, the National Science Foundation (NSF), along with five other U.S. government agencies, launched the Building the Prototype Open Knowledge Network (Proto-OKN). This $20 million initiative, will provide funding opportunities towards building a prototype version of an integrated data and knowledge infrastructure called an open knowledge network.
On the second day of the 2023 AAAS Annual Meeting, held in Washington, DC, the CCC supported its first of six panels, titled, Surveillance, Assistance or Hinderance?: Caregiving Technologies for Older Adults. The three panelists were Robin Brewer (University of Michigan), George Demiris (University of Pennsylvania), and Anne M. Turner (University of Washington), and the panel was moderated by CCC Council member Katie Siek (Indiana University).
Elections that are safe, secure, and verifiable by the public are an essential part of every democratic government. There have been public outcries for changes in the election process in the US and around the world as citizens have been frustrated with the lack of transparency. Election confidence from the majority of the public is not easy to obtain, but the panelists of a CCC-organized panel at the AAAS Annual Meeting made many suggestions on steps we can take to do just that.
The CCC accepts proposals for visioning activities from the community to catalyze innovative research at the frontiers of computing. Successful activities will articulate new research visions, galvanize community interest in those visions, mobilize support for those visions from the computing research community, government leaders, and funding agencies, and encourage broader segments of society to participate in computing research and education.
National Science Foundation recently announced a partnership with Ericsson, IBM, Intel, and Samsung to support the manufacturing and design of the next generation of semiconductors. The nearly $50 million partnership aims to invest in projects that encourage science and engineering researchers to apply a holistic, “co-design” approach to the way they develop semiconductors. Co-design approaches simultaneously consider the device/system performance, manufacturability, recyclability, and impact on the environment. Taking this design approach forces researchers to think of the whole lifecycle of a new technology, converging essential elements of the process into a single integrated process.
This program will hopefully alleviate the skyrocketing costs of cars and other chip-based products.
Recently, the National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource (NAIRR) Task Force released a roadmap to establish a national research infrastructure aimed to broaden access to resources for AI research and development. There are ever increasing opportunities to work with cutting-edge AI technologies, but many of the opportunities are limited to large companies, organizations and academic institutions with an abundance of resources. The implementation plan, Strengthening and Democratizing the U.S. Artificial Intelligence Innovation Ecosystem, aims to provide AI researchers and students with access to computational resources, high-quality data, training tools, and user support.
The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) has submitted a community report to the National Science Foundation (NSF) for a new Convergence Accelerator track on the topic of “Building Resilience to Climate Driven Extreme Events with Computing Innovations”.
The NSF’s Convergence Accelerator program, which was launched in 2019, aims to bring together researchers from diverse disciplines to collaborate on and expedite solutions to outstanding societal problems. Every year the Convergence Accelerator program accepts proposals from the community to identify Convergence Accelerator tracks for the next year. The NSF then funds workshops on some of these research tracks to allow these ideas to be fleshed out among researchers from various backgrounds. The CCC was selected to run a community workshop based on a proposal to NSF.
Recently, Computing Community Consortium (CCC) released a white paper, “Fostering Responsible Computing Research Report Recommendations for Computing Research Institutions: Actionable Steps,” which outlines the conclusions of the report, and presents a few community-generated ideas about implementing its findings at computing institutions. It is crucial that the computing community takes the findings of the report seriously, and takes immediate steps to compute more ethically and sustainably. Taking these intentional steps does not require computing researchers to become experts in ethics nor social and behavioral sciences. The focus should be on developing fundamental knowledge of and appreciation for responsible computing methods and approaches in the talent pool of students and researchers, which will require significant adjustments to the status quo.
The paper also describes CRA’s recently formed Socially Responsible Computing Working Group, which will advise the CRA Board on research ethics procedures, best practices for calls for papers and manuscript review, and sustainability issues in computing.
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) recently announced their 2023 class of Elevated Fellows. Among them are members of the community with past affiliations and/or involvement with the Computing Research Association and the Computing Community Consortium activities.
The Computing Community Consortium would like to congratulate the Vice Chair of the CCC, Dr. Nadya Bliss, on her appointment to the National Academies’ Climate Security Roundtable.
In January of 2021, Congress voted to direct the National Academies to establish the Climate Security Roundtable, which will provide expert support to the federal Climate Security Advisory Council (CSAC) in foreseeing and preventing climate security crises from escalating into issues of national security. This roundtable will facilitate conversations and collaboration surrounding a number of topics, including dissemination of relevant climate change data and information, discussion of understudied risks associated with climate change, improvements to existing climate change models and simulations, and any other capabilities or developments considered essential by the CSAC. The Climate Security Roundtable is comprised of experts in academia, industry, and civil society and will operate through September of 2025.
Moshe Y. Vardi, Computer Science Professor at Rice University and Senior Editor of Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), wrote an article in the November 2022 issue of the Communications of the ACM magazine, Accountability and Liability in Computing. The article articulates his concerns for the slow progress and lack of conclusive knowledge on how to build secure information systems. Vardi speculates the issue is not due to a lack of technical advancements but a lack of incentives encouraging hardware security developments and solutions. It is becoming vital to address this “market failure” as we become more reliant on technical systems and become increasingly vulnerable to cyberattacks.
