The CRA Bulletin frequently shares news, timely information about CRA initiatives, and items of interest to the general community.
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The CRA Leadership Academy seeks to help inform and cultivate future leaders in computing and computing research through a one-day in-person workshop, and a few follow-up virtual meetings among the Leadership Academy cohort. Participants will learn new skills and perspectives on leadership, hear from leaders in the field, test out leadership skills with scenarios, and build up their network of fellow leaders.
CRA-WP welcomes your nominations for the Early Career Awards honoring Anita Borg and Clarence “Skip” Ellis.
UCLA’s Momentum and CRA are excited to launch an Undergraduate BPC Literature Database that compiles scholarship on broadening participation in undergraduate computing. The focus of the included papers ranges from the implementation and evaluation of BPC interventions to theoretical pieces around broader social forces that cause longstanding inequalities in computing.
This work directly follows previous work that analyzed current and future Computer Science needs via advertised tenure-track faculty searches for 2022. This follow-on work looked to understand the relative success of institutions in hiring the tenured/tenure-track faculty in the areas of Computer Science that were being sought. This work also follows on a similar study of tenure-track faculty hiring outcomes last done in the pre-Covid impacted year of 2019. Survey respondents reported filling a total of 289 tenure-track faculty for an aggregate success rate of 76%, which is comparable to the 2019 study.
View the full report at: https://web.cs.wpi.edu/~cew/papers/outcomes22.pdf
One of the tracks during the July 2022 Computing Research Association’s (CRA) flagship conference at Snowbird, Utah was “Computing in Industry,” which covered how research is conducted in industry and the partnership between industry and academia. This fall CRA-Industry (CRA-I) has been processing the discussions, slides, and notes from this track and our Inaugural CRA-I Meeting at Snowbird. We are pleased to release a report highlighting the common themes that emerged. It is clear that there is a much needed role for CRA-I in the community. The presentations and subsequent discussions showcased where the industry community is right now and what needs to be worked on with CRA-I’s help.
The Computing Research Association seeks your help in recruiting candidates for its Board of Directors. We want individuals who have time, energy, initiative, and resources to work on CRA issues on behalf of the entire CRA community. We have a working Board, and all members are expected to work on community issues.
Members of the computing research community who are interested in serving on the CRA Board should nominate themselves by completing this form by December 16, 2022. Nominees do not need to be affiliated with a CRA member organization.
The Computing Research Association invites nominations for the 2023 CRA Distinguished Service Award and A. Nico Habermann Award. Nominate a colleague today!
The Computing Research Association Education Committee (CRA-E) is now accepting nominations for the CRA-E Graduate Fellows Program.
CRA-Industry (CRA-I) is delighted to announce that Lisa Amini (IBM Research) has joined the CRA-I Steering Committee.
Amanda Stent has recently replaced Sandhya Dwarkadas as the CRA-WP representative on the CRA Board. Susan Rodger now serves as CRA-WP Co-chair along with Stent. We would like to thank Dwarkadas for her service as a CRA Board member and CRA-WP Co-chair.
On November 10, 2022 from 12:00-3:00pm EST, the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is hosting a virtual workshop sponsored by the National Science Foundation’s Convergence Accelerator program. This workshop will be the second of a two part workshop series titled, Building Resilience to Climate Driven Extreme Events with Computing Innovations: A Convergence Accelerator Workshop, the first of which will be held in late October.
In the first installment of the CRA Update: Keeping you in the know column, we began synthesizing feedback received during the opening plenary (“CRA: Looking Forward”) of the 2022 CRA Conference at Snowbird. We finish summarizing the feedback received in this month’s column.
The Computing Research Association (CRA) is planning an Accessible Technology for All workshop co-hosted by CRA-Industry (CRA-I), Computing Community Consortium (CCC), and CRA-Widening Participation (CRA-WP) on February 22-23, 2023 in Washington, DC. This workshop is one of the activities CRA is currently pursuing under the umbrella of Socially Responsible Computing, one of the topics identified in the recent CRA Strategic Planning Effort.
CRA-WP will host two Graduate Cohort Workshops in 2023! The Grad Cohort Workshop for Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, Accessibility, and Leadership Skills (GC-IDEALS) is designed specifically for graduate school populations underrepresented in computing research. The Grad Cohort Workshop for Women is designed for women students in their first, second, or third year of graduate school in computing fields.
Grad Cohort participants will have an opportunity to build mentoring relationships and develop peer networks intended to form the basis for ongoing activities during their graduate career and beyond.
The IEEE Computer Society’s Tech Forum on Digital Platforms and Societal Harms brings together policymakers and technologists to explore the intersection of current technical efforts with public policies, and the resulting impacts on society.
In an opinion piece published in The Hill, Dan Reed, former CRA Board Chair and current National Science Board Chair, and Darío Gil, a member of the National Science Board and senior vice president and Director of IBM Research, say that Congress must follow through on fully funding NSF or risk dooming the CHIPS and Science Act.
CRA would like to welcome two new members to its Board of Directors: Raquel Hill (Spelman College) and Eunice E. Santos (University of Illinois).
The CRA-E Undergraduate Research Faculty Mentoring Award honors faculty members in computing who have made a significant impact on students they have mentored.
The Biden Administration released a set of principles aimed at creating a Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights to, “help guide the design, development, and deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) and other automated systems so that they protect the rights of the American public.”
In an effort to improve the recruiting process for academic and industrial/government positions, the CRA launched the CV Database initiative in Fall 2018. The CV Database (https://cra.org/cv-database/ ) allows candidates to upload their resumes, research and teaching statements, job objectives and other preferences, and a link to a presentation video. Recruiters with access are able to search this information and contact candidates. Recruiter access is available to CRA academic members. It is also available to industry or government members that have sponsored CRA-WP’s Grad Cohort at the silver level and above.
The CV Database is now open for the 2022-23 recruiting season! It can be accessed through https://cra.org/cv-database/. The CRA has opened access earlier than in previous years to accommodate those job seekers wanting to get on the market at the beginning of the academic year. Recruiter access is also available. Recruiters who do not have previous access can request access through the Recruiter Access Form.
ACM seeks the community’s help in generating nominations for the ACM awards listed below. Please refer to each Award’s Nomination page for guidelines on how to nominate: https://awards.acm.org/award-nominations
Nominations are due December 15, 2022, with the exception of the Doctoral Dissertation Award which is due October 31, 2022.
As part of our efforts to increase communications, we welcome you to this CRA Update: Keeping you in the know column. For involvement in CRA activities, we will begin (on an annual basis) requesting nominations (self-nominations are welcome!) from the computing research community to participate in various CRA activities. We request you share the following form with anyone in your institution who might be interested in getting involved in CRA’s activities this academic year (though June 30th): cra.org/interest-form (Deadline: September 30th, 2022)
On July 18-19, the Computing Research Association (CRA) held its July board meeting immediately before the 2022 CRA Conference at Snowbird. The meeting was led by CRA Board Chair Nancy Amato, with assistance from Executive Director Tracy Camp (who began her new role on July 1). The Board discussed many new initiatives and board members were encouraged to consider volunteering for one of more of the committees/working groups that CRA will have this year.
Ian Foster, former Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council Member and Professor at the University of Chicago and Division Director at Argonne National Laboratory, was just named the 2022 Ken Kennedy award recipient.
The Computing Research Association (CRA) is pleased to announce the annual CRA Award for Outstanding Undergraduate Researchers, which recognizes undergraduate students in North American colleges and universities who show outstanding research potential in an area of computing research. The award is a wonderful way to recognize your best student researchers and your department.
After a four year hiatus due to COVID, the Computing Research Association (CRA) was thrilled to host the 2022 CRA Conference in person from July 19-21 in Snowbird, Utah. CRA welcomed department chairs and computing research leaders from across the country to network and discuss common issues concerning the future of the field. There were several engaging conference sessions on Computing Departments, Computing Education, Computing in Industry, and Computing for Good.
Chris Ramming, Senior Director for Research and Innovation at VMWare, will be a speaker at the Symposium on the Future of Computing Research held by the University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute on September 12-13, 2022. Ramming is a member of both the CRA Board of Directors and the Computing Research Association-Industry (CRA-I) Steering Committee. His talk will discuss how to plan collaborative research between universities and companies and how researchers should tackle twenty-first century problems.
The National Science Foundation recently selected sixty-nine recipients of the 2022 CSGrad4US Fellowship Program. The objective of the Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Graduate Fellowships (CSGrad4US) is to increase the number of diverse, domestic graduate students pursuing research and innovation careers in the CISE fields: computer science, computer engineering, or information science. CSGrad4US recipients will participate in the CSGrad4US Mentoring Program organized by the Computing Research Association with funding provided by the National Science Foundation through award #2231962.
Fatma Özcan, a Principal Software Engineer in the Systems Research at Google, has been awarded the 2022 Very Large Database (VLDB) Women in Database Research Award.
The CRA Education Committee (CRA-E) recently welcomed two new members to its board: Borja Sotomayor and Steven Swanson. Susanne Hambrusch (Purdue University) has stepped down as the committee Co-Chair, and Kelly Shaw (Williams College) has stepped into the role, serving along with Lori Pollock (Delaware). Susanne will remain a board member and continue her work in a different role. Brandon Myers will be leaving the CRA-E board in August, and CRA-E thanks him for contributions during his service on the committee.
