Tag Archive: CCC
Articles relevant to the Computing Community Consortium.
The Biden-Harris Administration is continuing their recent efforts to advance the research, development, and deployment of responsible AI.
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.
On February 22-23, 2023 in Washington, DC, the Computing Research Association (CRA) held the Accessible Technology for All Workshop.
The workshop was attended by over 40 participants from academia, industry, and government and 20 remote participants. The purpose of this workshop was to frame the state of the art of accessible technology, identify forces shaping the evolution of accessible technology, and develop an understanding of implications for the next wave of computer science research in accessibility. By the end of the workshop, important areas of future research were identified and the need for tech-informed policy were highlighted by the participants. A workshop report will be forthcoming.
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.
