The National Artificial Intelligence (AI) Research Resource (NAIRR) Task Force convened its third virtual public meeting to further develop a vision and implementation plan for the NAIRR. Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council member Ian Foster (Argonne National Laboratory and University of Chicago), was invited to speak about the recently published A National Discovery Cloud: Preparing the US for Global Competitiveness in the New Era of 21st Century Digital Transformation white paper.  In addition, 84 responses from industry, academia, and government stakeholders were recently released regarding the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the National Science Foundation request for information to develop an implementation roadmap for the NAIRR. […]

Rika Antonova began her CIFellowship in January 2021 after receiving her PhD from KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm in December 2020. Antonova is at Stanford University working with Jeannette Bohg, Assistant Professor of Robotics at Stanford.  Current Project Machine learning is transforming robotics: we can now solve high-dimensional problems that have been intractable before, if given large amounts of data and ample training time. However, to go beyond structured factory settings, it is important for robots to adapt to changes in the environment/task without lengthy re-training and data collection. A related problem is closing the simulation-to-reality gap: adapting to the real world after training in simulation. My goal […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is pleased to announce the release of a new white paper,  A National Discovery Cloud: Preparing the US for Global Competitiveness in the New Era of 21st Century Digital Transformation, led by Ian Foster with significant support from Daniel Lopresti, Bill Gropp, Mark D. Hill, and Katie Schuman. The three “pillars,” as the paper calls them, of this new computation fabric include the “emergence of public cloud utilities as a new computing platform; the ability to extract information from enormous quantities of data via machine learning; and the emergence of computational simulation as a research method on par with experimental science.”  In order for the […]

In October 2020, the Computing Research Association (CRA) and the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) released more than a dozen white papers exploring areas and issues around computing research with the potential to address national priorities over the next four years. Called “Quadrennial Papers,” the white papers attempt to portray a broad picture of computing research detailing potential research directions, challenges, and recommendations for policymakers and the computing research community. As a continuation of our 2020 series, we are delighted to release two more papers titled: “Taking Stock of the Present and Future of Smart Technologies for Older Adults and Caregivers” and “Imagine All the People: Citizen Science, Artificial Intelligence, and […]

Contributions to this post were provided by CCC Vice Chair Daniel Lopresti.  AI for Good Global Summit hosted a webinar on AI to Prevent Modern Slavery, Human Trafficking and Forced and Child Labour today and featured Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Executive Council Member Nadya Bliss (Executive Director of the Global Security Initiative at Arizona State University) as well as Alice Eckstein (Programme Manager, Modern Slavery Programme at United Nations University – Centre for Policy Research), Doreen Boyd (Professor of Earth Observation, Faculty of Social Sciences at University of Nottingham), James Goulding (Deputy Director N/LAB, Faculty of Social Sciences at University of Nottingham) and Anjali Mazumder (Thematic Lead on AI, Justice […]

An increasing number of National Science Foundation (NSF) Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) solicitations, including the CISE Core Programs (for which SMALL Projects do not have a submission deadline), are eligible for cloud access via the CloudBank portal to the AWS, Azure, GCP, and IBM clouds. These clouds offer enormous capacity and rich software stacks. Another plus: access through CloudBank is not subject to indirect cost. For further information: An AWS Public Sector Blog post by Deep Medhi (NSF) and Sanjay Padhi (AWS): https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/publicsector/simplifying-access-cloud-resources-researchers-cloudbank/ A webinar featuring Deep Medhi, Sanjay Padhi, and Mike Norman (UCSD; PI of NSF’s CloudBank effort): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtdhxFOrIcM&feature=youtu.be CloudBank: https://www.cloudbank.org/ July 2018 workshop report “Enabling […]