The CRA Bulletin frequently shares news, timely information about CRA initiatives, and items of interest to the general community.
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The Computing Research Association’s Committee on Widening Participation in Computing Research (CRA-WP) is committed to improving the working environment and increasing the success of all Computer Scientists and Engineers, without regard for gender, race, sexual orientation or socioeconomic background.
The Computing Research Association is pleased to announce a new iteration of the Graduate Cohort Workshop designed specifically for underrepresented minorities in computing and persons with disabilities. Applications are now open for the inaugural CRA URM Graduate Cohort Workshop, which will be held March 16-17, 2018 in San Diego, CA.
After serving the CRA-W community as a Program Associate for two and a half years, Melissa Borts has left CRA to return to school. Melissa is returning to her alma mater, the University of Maryland, to pursue her MBA.
With graduate enrollment increasing for women in computer and information sciences, the entry point for the field’s educational pipeline is more robust than ever. Yet, it appears that the challenge remains to increase retention and completion of degrees. In order to expand the pipeline, our efforts must focus on both recruitment of potential talents and support throughout graduate studies that leads to desired career outcomes.
Most broadening participation efforts have focused on women and underrepresented minorities. However, for more than 10 years, AccessComputing has been funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to increase the successful participation of students with disabilities in academic programs and careers. AccessComputing addresses underrepresentation by providing multiple activities for students with disabilities.
CRA has recently hired Claire Brady as a program manager. In her new role, she is responsible for planning CRA’s Committee on the Status of Women in Computing Research (CRA-W) program events and providing support to initiatives that enrich the community’s awareness of CRA, its committees, mission, and services.
Jaime Teevan will replace Margaret Martonosi on the CRA Board on July 1.
As a little girl growing up in the Dominican Republic, Yerika Jimenez, currently a Ph.D. student in computing at the University of Florida, noticed she had a knack for fixing things – cell phones, TVs, radios. Everyone in her community would bring her broken items, and she would return them repaired. A few years later, when Jimenez was nine years old, her family settled in New Jersey, and her fascination with technology continued.
The main focus of my recent research has been computer science education and the role computer science can play in defining and advancing its own education research. Learning computational principles and learning to code is hard, and teaching these subjects is even harder. For most computer science topics, we know very little about how different learners’ best learn; how to effectively teach the material to audiences with different abilities, backgrounds, and goals; and how to reliably assess learning.
CRA members have elected two new members to its board of directors: Carla Brodley and Kim Hazelwood. Current board members Nancy Amato, Susan Davidson, Dan Grossman, Brent Hailpern, Susanne Hambrusch, Barbara Ryder and Ellen Zegura were re-elected to the CRA board. Also beginning July 1, Brian Noble will be the USENIX representative to the CRA board replacing Margo Seltzer. Retiring from the board as of June 30, 2017 are David Culler, Mary Czerwinski and Seltzer. CRA thanks them all for contributions during their service on the board.
Krintz believes it is important in computing research to push technology forward by including people with diverse perspectives and ideas. To do that, she supports increasing underrepresented minority participation in computing. “I think it benefits both society and technology in general. Personally, it’s just so inspiring to see young people have new ideas, get excited, and want to go out and change the world.”
CRA-Women invites nominations for the Borg Early Career Award (BECA). he award honors the late Anita Borg, who was an early member of CRA-W and is inspired by her commitment to increasing the participation of women in computing research.
Tanya Amert, a computer science Ph.D. student at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, found herself drawn to computer science because she enjoyed figuring out how things work. At 13 years old, she was a big fan of the Neopets website and online community. Amert noticed some users had customized homepages, and her interest grew even more. Despite not knowing any HTML at the time, she learned how to look at the source code and figured out how to change the color of the scroll bar within the CSS. “I discovered that specific lines of HTML made that happen. And I thought that was mind boggling and awesome.”
The mission of the CRA Committee on the Status of Women in Computing Research (CRA-W) is to increase the success and participation of women in computing research and education at all levels. There are several ways you can get involved by mentoring students, submitting proposals and sharing these opportunities with your colleagues and students.
In February, Ayanna Howard from Georgia Institute of Technology received the 2016 A. Nico Habermann Award for her sustained commitment to increasing diversity in computing. Howard is currently a CRA-W board member, and at Georgia Tech, she has provided research opportunities to dozens of undergraduates – more than 75% of whom are underrepresented minorities or women, and a majority of these students have gone on to graduate school. Nominations for the 2017 A. Nico Habermann Award are due on Friday, December 9.
Morgan Carroll, a senior studying computer science at University of Texas at Tyler, fondly remembers her grandfather buying her a HP Pavilion with Windows 98 when she was eight years old. “From then on I just loved computers. In high school, I figured out that I was good at math. So when I went off to college, I took my love of computers and math and decided to try computer science.”
Carroll focuses on general programming and enjoys figuring out how to accomplish project objectives. Last year, one of her professor’s suggested she participate in a Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU), so she searched for one on the National Science Foundation REU opportunities webpage. She was particularly excited about a research project at the University of Alabama. The project was supported by CRA-Women’s Distributed Research Experiences for Undergraduates (DREU) program, which matches students with a faculty mentor for a summer research experience at the faculty mentor’s home institution.
The University at Buffalo (UB) Department of Computer Science and Engineering is celebrating its 50th anniversary this academic year. It has chosen this occasion to honor successful women in computing with a year-long speaker series. The Distinguished Speaker Series highlights several CRA board members.
The 2016 Graduate Cohort Workshop (Grad Cohort) brought together more than 30 accomplished speakers and 550 female graduate students in computing. Rita H. Wouhaybi who is a research scientist with Intel Labs’ Systems and Software Research at Intel Corporation, was one of the speakers who shared her unique perspective with the attendees.
The upcoming CRA-Women Graduate Student Cohort (Grad Cohort) will be held April 7-8, 2017 in Washington, D.C. Grad Cohort is a two-day workshop for female students in their first, second, or third year of graduate school in computing fields. The application closes November 30.
Grad Cohort is generously funded by sponsors from industry, academia, the National Science Foundation, and the computing community. The workshop aims to increase the ranks of senior women in computing-related studies and research by building and mentoring nationwide communities of women through their graduate studies.
From an early age, current Ph.D. student and 2016 Graduate Cohort Workshop (Grad Cohort) attendee Caroline Trippel had a positive image of women in computing. Her mother earned an undergraduate degree in math, a Master’s degree in computer science, and currently works as an embedded systems software engineer.
Please share this opportunity with your students. During CRA-W’s Virtual Undergraduate Town Hall Event, students from around the world will learn about cutting edge research in the field of computing, and have the opportunity to ask questions to distinguished computer scientists. The next event will be held October 13 at 7PM EST. Speaker: Deb Agarwal, Senior […]
The 2016 Graduate Cohort Workshop (Grad Cohort) brought together more than 30 accomplished speakers and 550 female graduate students in computing. Kim Hazelwood, who leads a performance and datacenter capacity engineering and analysis team within Facebook’s infrastructure division, was one of the speakers who shared her unique perspective with the attendees. Kim has always had an interest in technology and a love for math. Like many undergraduate students, Kim didn’t take any computer science classes in high school. However, she took a leap and declared computer engineering as her major heading into her undergraduate degree at Clemson University. “First time was a charm on actually picking the right area for me,” she explained.
CRA’s Committee on the Status of Women in Computing Research (CRA-W) will host early and mid career mentoring workshops on November 19-20 in Washington, D.C. The goal of these workshops is to provide an environment for mentoring, practical information, advice, and support among researchers and educators in computing. The application is free, there is a $250 registration fee for the workshop (for those accepted), and CRA-W will reimburse participants for expenses (hotel and airfare) after the workshop. In order to receive reimbursement applicants must be affiliated with a U.S. institution or be employed in the U.S. These workshops are open to individuals in their early career in research and labs, and mid career in education, research, and labs.
CRA’s Committee on the Status of Women in Computing Research (CRA-W) recently announced a new program for undergraduates, the CRA-W Grace Hopper Celebration (GHC) Research Scholars Program. The GHC Research Scholars program brings undergraduate women to the annual Grace Hopper Celebration. The purpose of this program is to provide attendees with an unique experience, providing them a mentor, networking opportunities, and advising.
An early love of science fiction is what initially lured Drew to a career in STEM. Her fascination with outer space and the future, recurrent themes in science fiction, inspired her to study astronomy and become a physics major. Although she didn’t take any high school computer science courses, she always enjoyed tinkering with computer programs on her own. She decided in college to take a coding class and “really loved it.” Drew soon changed her major to computer science because she wanted to be part of the movement that brings to life the technologies we dream about in science fiction.
During this Virtual Undergraduate Town Hall event, students will learn about cutting edge research in the field of computing and have the opportunity to ask distinguished computer scientists questions. The state of the art in cloth simulation can produce highly realistic cloth, but requires extremely high computation time, on the order of hours or even days.
Again and again we hear that earning computing degrees leads to one of the highest starting salaries for college graduates and almost a guaranteed job after graduation. This information is supported by data from the National Association of Colleges and Employers who report computer science graduates have the second highest starting salary ($61,321 this year) and the highest full-time employment rate (76% within six months of graduation). A blog post from the Computing Community Consortium in March highlights 2016 Bureau of Labor Statistics job projection results, which found that computing occupations are projected to account for 73% of all newly-created STEM jobs during the decade (488,500 jobs), and 55% of all available STEM jobs, whether newly-created or available due to retirements (1,083,800 jobs over the decade). All of this isn’t new information. Many people are aware that the booming tech industry can be a ticket to job security and comfortable living. Data from the National Science Foundation in 2014, shows that there are approximately 17.8% of women studying computer science at the undergraduate level. So why is it every CS classroom I am in is filled with bright-eyed, eager young men, but a dismal number
At a briefing of the congressional Diversity in Tech Caucus, hosted by Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) in the Capitol yesterday, CRA-W board member Rebecca Wright explained why efforts to increase the participation of women and underrepresented minorities in STEM fields — particularly computing — were worthy of continued Federal support. Wright, a professor of computer science at Rutgers University, was a member of a panel of experts assembled by the Diversity in Tech Caucus to explore the issue of diversity within the research and STEM Education communities.
CRA-W and CDC are jointly soliciting proposals for discipline-specific mentoring workshops. The goal of these workshops is to provide career mentoring and networking opportunities in the context of a specific research area. Workshop proposals should include coverage of technical topics such as important recent results and future related research directions. These workshops are commonly co-located with major conferences in the sub-field. Our vision is that we will offer seed funding for workshops that will later be sustained by the community.
Today, CRA-Women (CRA-W) announced that Martha Kim and Hanna Wallach are the recipients of this year’s 2016 Borg Early Career Award (BECA). The award honors the late Anita Borg, who was an early member of CRA-W and an inspiration for her commitment in increasing the participation of women in computing research. The annual award is given to a woman in computer […]
Hewlett Packard Enterprise (NYSE: HPE), in collaboration with Applied Computer Security Associates (ACSA) and the Computing Research Association’s Committee on the Status of Women in Computing Research (CRA-W), today announced 16 new recipients and 8 continuing recipients of the 2016 Scholarship for Women Studying Information Security (SWSIS).
