The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) sponsored another track in its Blue Sky Ideas Conference Track series at the 29th Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-15), January 25-30, 2015 in Austin, Texas. The purpose of this conference was to promote research in artificial intelligence (AI) and scientific exchange among AI researchers, practitioners, scientists, and engineers in affiliated disciplines. The goal of this track was to present ideas and visions that can stimulate the research community to pursue new directions, such as new problems, new application domains, or new methodologies. The winning papers were: Machine Teaching: an Inverse Problem to Machine Learning and an Approach Toward Optimal Education Xiaojin Zhu (Department of Computer Sciences, […]

The following is a guest blog post by Thyagarajan Nandagopal, National Science Foundation (NSF) Program Director for Computer and Network Systems (CNS).  The NSF Directorate for Computer & Information Science & Engineering (CISE) will host a one-day workshop on CAREER Proposal Writing on March 16, 2015. This workshop will be held at the Arlington Hilton. The goal of this workshop is to introduce junior CAREER-eligible faculty to the NSF CAREER program and help them to prepare their CAREER proposals to target CISE programs. Attendees will have the opportunity to improve their skills in proposal writing, as well as to interact with NSF program directors from different CISE divisions (ACI, CCF, CNS, and […]

Contributions to this post were made by Lorenzo Alvisi, Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council Member and Professor in the Department of Computer Science at UT Austin and Robbert van Renesse, Principal Research Scientist in the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University.  Imagine slipping into a presentation that has already started and finding a seat in the back. The speaker is pointing at her slides explaining the diagram but you can barely hear her from the back of the room. All the sudden your cell phone, which you had placed on the table when you took your seat, begins to project the speaker’s voice. Now you can watch the speaker and […]

Congratulations to Benjamin Recht, assistant professor of electrical engineering, computer science, and statistics at the University of California, Berkeley, for receiving the 2015 William O. Baker Award for Initiatives in Research in the field of statistics and machine learning. From the website: Recht is being honored for his significant contributions to the field of data science, an area of research that combines statistics (the analysis of large amounts of numerical data), computer science, and mathematics. A common problem in the modern world is that there is lots of data but it is usually incomplete. Recht’s work has been particularly valuable in a broad area of mathematics that uses assumptions to reconstruct data—matrix completion […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) council nomination deadline is next Friday, February 6, 2015.   See complete details — including nominating instructions — below: The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is charged with catalyzing and empowering the U.S. computing research community to articulate and advance major research directions for the field. To do so, the CCC needs truly visionary leaders — people with great ideas, sound judgment, and the willingness to work hard to see things to completion. Please help the computing community by nominating such people for the Council.   Established in 2006 through a cooperative agreement between the U.S. National Science Foundation and the Computing Research Association (CRA) — representing over 220 North American […]

The following is a guest blog post by Tom Dietterich, current president for The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) and Eric Horvitz, former president of AAAI. The first winter AAAI meeting is occurring now in Austin, Texas until Friday, January 30, 2015.  Discussions about Artificial Intelligence (AI) have jumped into the public eye over the past year, with several luminaries speaking publicly about the threat of AI to the future of humanity.   Over the last several decades, AI — computing methods for automated perception, learning, understanding, and reasoning — have become commonplace in our lives. We plan trips using GPS systems that rely on AI to cut through the complexity of millions […]