IEEE Computer Society Special Technical Communities

Special Technical Communities (STCs) are technical, educational, and professional resources on emerging topics that are outside or beyond the scope of the Computer Society’s Technical Committees.  They are online communities of computing professionals who share a common technical, career, or technical interest, and which can be created around any set of ideas relevant to the members and professional colleagues of the Computer Society.  Their membership is open to both members and non-members and available at no cost. Further, anyone, member or not can participate and can propose the creation of new STCs.

This year, several STCs have opted to expand their activities and promote new connections by organizing new activities at COMPSAC.  These include the formation of the following COMPSAC Workshops, and inviting papers be submitted for presentation at the conference:

  1. The STC, Social Networking: SoNeC – Social Network Computing & Big Data is sponsoring SoNeC 2020: The 1st IEEE International Workshop on Social Network Computing & Big Data whose aim is to provide a forum to foster interactions between researchers and developers interested in Social Network computing and Big Data, and to give attendees an opportunity to interact with experts in academia, industry, and government. Selected and extended version of papers presented will be published in journal special issues.
  2. The STC, Parallel Models and Systems: DataFlow and Beyond (DFM)is offering its 8th workshop entitled DFM – Data Flow Models & Extreme  Scale Computing. The workshop aims to highlight advancements to event-driven and data-driven models of computation for extreme scale computing as well as parallel and distributed computing for high-performance computing. It also aims at fostering exchange between dataflow practitioners at the theoretical and practitioner levels.
  3. The STC, Big Data has organized CCR 2020, the 1st IEEE International Workshop on Emerging Topics in Cognitive Computing and Robotics. This workshop focuses on challenges in effective storage, processing, and analytics of the massive amounts of data used in developing cognitive robotics.
  4. The STC Information technology (IT) is proposing AIML 2020, the 3rd IEEE International Workshop on Advances in Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning: Addressing Risks & Concerns. The workshop’s aim is to examine risks and concerns of AI and machine learning (ML) and showcase scientific, technical, and practical advances in addressing them.  The workshop will also highlight recent advances in AI and ML and their applications, cover AI strategy and policy, examine development and deployment challenges, and discuss concepts such as AI for good, Responsible AI, and Explainable AI. It is an interactive forum for AI researchers, practitioners and business executives for discussion on key issues and challenges and practices related to AI applications, and for sharing case studies and application experience.
  5. In addition, the symposium ITIP: IT in Practice is also organized by the STC Information technology (IT).  Aligned with the conference theme “Driving Intelligent Transformation of the Digital World,” the symposium focuses on diverse elements necessary to successfully architect, design, engineer, configure, and field IT applications as well as application-oriented research outcomes.  It also covers new risks and concerns of IT and its applications.

These examples showcase but a small portion of the exciting program presented at this year’s COMPSAC, which includes no fewer than 22 workshops and 12 symposia, in addition to the main track of the conference.  The program should appeal to all, whether researchers or practitioners, and we look forward to your participation in any number of these events, meeting colleagues, exchanging ideas, perhaps coming up with new projects as a result, and expanding everyone’s horizons.  And when you return home, do consider giving back to the community and think of volunteering in some position, be it administration of the conference, participating in the reviewing process, or even organizing an event under the COMPSAC umbrella.

For further information about the STCs, please go to the Computer Society page at https://www.computer.org/communities/special-technical-communities

COMPSAC Special Technical Community (STC) Coordinator

Jean-Luc Gaudiot, University of California Irvine, USA