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We will be hosting a one-hour CIFellow 2021 Informational Webinar on Thursday, April 15th at 2:30PM ET. There will be an introduction by NSF, a presentation of the program, concluding with a Q&A session. Please register here for the webinar.
The Computing Research Association (CRA) and Computing Community Consortium (CCC) are pleased to announce a new Computing Innovation Fellows (CIFellows) cohort for 2021. This program recognizes the continued disruption to hiring in academic institutions due to the COVID-19 pandemic. As before, this program aims to provide a career-enhancing bridge experience for recent and soon-to-be […]
In June 2020, a community of Black people in computing from around the world published an open letter, initiated by the authors, and a call for action[b] to the global computing community. The letter began with, “The recent killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis Police has sparked a movement that began at the birth of our nation. Though George Floyd may have been the most recent instance, we should not forget the lives of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Nina Pop, Tony McDade, Sandra Bland, Trayvon Martin, Aiyana Stanley-Jones, Philando Castille, Tanisha Anderson, Atatiana Jefferson, Eric Garner, Charleena Lyles, Eula Love, Michael Brown, Khalif Browder, Botham Jean, Tamir Rice, Latasha Harlins, Amadou Diallo, Mary Turner, Emmett Till, and too many other Black people who have been murdered …”
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 Computational Research.”
CRA members have elected three new members to its Board of Directors: Diana Franklin, Katie Siek and Eve Schooler. James Allan, Stephanie Forrest, Ayanna Howard, Ran Libeskind-Hadas, Rachel Pottinger, and Chris Ramming were re-elected to the CRA board. All of their terms run from July 1, 2021 through June 30, 2024. Vivek Sarkar will remain on the board as the co-chair of the CRA Industry Committee. CRA would like to thank everyone who agreed to run this year.
After careful consideration of the current and projected situation surrounding the pandemic, CRA has unfortunately decided to cancel the in-person CRA Conference at Snowbird scheduled to take place this August. At this time, there are simply too many uncertainties to move forward.
We believe interaction is a critical feature of this conference. Given we held a virtual version last year, we have decided not to organize a hybrid or entirely virtual meeting this year, as this is typically an off year for Snowbird. CRA is currently planning to hold a full in-person Conference at Snowbird on July 19-21, 2022.
Using CRA Data Buddies Survey data, this analysis presents changes in undergraduate students’ highest degree intentions over the course of a year. Students who participated in an REU during that year showed an interest in pursuing a higher-level academic degree than those who did not participate in an REU.
In Fall 2020, the Computing Research Association released a series of planned white papers produced through its subcommittees (including the Computing Community Consortium), 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.
One of those white papers Pandemic Informatics: Preparation, Robustness, and Resilience outlined a strategy to reduce the impact of global pandemics stressing early detection, predicting the public’s reaction and developing effective policies.
Several months later, the pandemic is still ongoing but we are facing a new and different set of challenges that are both surprising and yet also somehow predictable. The authors of the paper have produced a March 22nd, 2021 Addendum to address current issues.
See the March 22nd, 2021 Pandemic Informatics: Preparation, Robustness, and Resilience Addendum here for more details.
On Monday, March 15, CRA’s Burçin Tamer was a panelist at the SIGCSE 2021 session, “How Student Surveys Drive Change: Using the Data Buddies Department Report from the Computing Research Association.” Tamer and panelists discussed how departments can use their students’ responses to the Data Buddies survey to make meaningful changes in their department.
At SIGCSE 2021, CRA’s Betsy Bizot will be a panelist for the session, “Exploring the Data on Dual Pandemics: How Racism and COVID-19 Have Impacted the Computing Community“. Bizot will discuss the results from two CRA surveys about the COVID-19 disruption from summer 2020 and a few tidbits from this year’s CRA Taulbee Survey ahead of full publication in May. The session will be held from 1:00 PM – 2:45 PM EDT on Wednesday, March 17.
The CRA Center for Evaluating the Research Pipeline (CERP) is excited to launch a new blog called the CERP Bulletin to share news, research and evaluation findings, promote resources and community platforms, and provide helpful context to CERP’s mission. The CERP Bulletin will include CERP research activity, infographics, evaluation reports, and interesting CERP-related articles.
We encourage you to stay updated on CERP through the Bulletin by signing up for our mailing list, which you can do here.
This post is brought to you by the CRA’s Center for Evaluating the Research Pipeline (CERP). CERP provides social science research and comparative evaluation for the computing community. Volunteer for Data Buddies by signing-up here.
Mary Jane Irwin was selected to receive the 2021 A. Nico Habermann Award in recognition of her more than 30 years of diversity efforts, both in academia and in professional organizations. James Kurose was selected to receive the 2021 Distinguished Service Award in recognition of his exemplary service to the computing research community. Through a career spanning more that 35 years, he has distinguished himself as national leader in numerous impactful service roles in the computing research community.
The Education Committee of the Computing Research Association (CRA-E) is proud to announce two recipients of the 2021 CRA-E Undergraduate Research Faculty Mentoring Award: Tijana Milenkovic from University of Notre Dame and Saad Biaz from Auburn University. These outstanding individuals are being recognized for providing exceptional mentorship, undergraduate research experiences, and, in parallel, guidance on admission and matriculation of their students to research-focused graduate programs in computing.
On February 22-23, CRA held its annual Computing Research Leadership Summit for the senior leadership of CRA member societies and winter board meeting.
An increasing number of NSF 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.
The goal of the 2021 CMD-IT Academic Careers Workshop is to mentor assistant- and associate-level faculty, senior doctoral students, and postdocs in computing about academic careers.
CRA Board Member Timothy M. Pinkston has organized and will moderate the panel, “Valuing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Our Computing Community” from 1:30 to 3 PM (EST) on March 3rd at this year’s co-located HPCA’21, PPoPP’21, CGO’21 and CC’21 conferences (virtual due to COVID-19).
The National Academy of Engineering (NAE) has elected 106 new members and 23 foreign members. Several computing researchers are among those elected this year, including those with CRA connections. Among them are Margaret Martonosi and Kunle Olukotun.
The NSF Directorate for Computer & Information Science & Engineering (CISE) will host a one-day workshop on CAREER Proposal Writing on April 5, 2021.
CRA is pleased to announce the 2021 Election Committee’s slate of nominees for the CRA Board. CRA also encourages nominations by petition, which are due by February 22.
In response to the National Science Foundation (NSF) Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Directorate’s recently announced CSGrad4US Fellowship program, the Computing Research Association’s Education (CRA-E) and Widening Participation (CRA-WP) committees, with CRA support, are exploring the development of a CSGrad4US Mentoring Program to support recipients of the CSGrad4US Fellowship.
Inspire or encourage a student to try computer science, and let them know they belong. Together let’s change the face of computer science.
NSF CISE has announced the new CSGrad4US Graduate Fellowship program that aims to increase the number of diverse, domestic graduate students pursuing research and innovation careers in the CISE fields.
CRA-WP is accepting applications for two programs: Scholarships for Women Studying Information Security and Distributed Experiences for Undergraduates. Nominations are due March 31 for two award programs: Skip Ellis Early Career Award and Anita Borg Early Career Award.
CRA welcomes Forrest Shull as a new Board Member. Shull is President of IEEE-CS and replaces Greg Byrd as one of the IEEE-CS representatives on the CRA Board, serving along with Leila De Floriani.
This updated work follows a full study released in November 2020, on faculty hiring in Computer Science for hires starting in 2021. That work analyzed hiring based on ads through mid-November 2020 and found significant decreases in the number of institutions searching and the number of positions being sought. This updated work considers ads through the end of December 2020 and is intended to understand the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on whether searches have been delayed or simply will not materialize this hiring season.
CRA welcomes Arvind Krishnamurthy as a new Board Member. Krishnamurthy is the Vice President of the USENIX Board of Directors and replaces Brian Noble as the USENIX representative on the CRA Board. Noble joined the CRA Board in 2017, and CRA thanks him for his term of service.
The CRA Education Committee, with support from NSF, is organizing a Virtual Pre‐Symposium Event for Teaching-Track Faculty at SIGCSE 2021. The event will be held on Friday, March 12, 2021 from 1:00 – 5:00 PM EST. We are now accepting applications to the event! Click here for more information and a tentative agenda. 2020 event information is available here.
Congratulations to the recipients of the 2021 Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award. This year’s nominees are a very impressive group. A number of them were commended for making significant contributions to more than one research project, several are authors or coauthors on multiple papers, others have made presentations at major conferences, and some have produced software artifacts that were in widespread use.
CRA Board Member Timothy Pinkston is featured in this week’s “People of ACM”. In the Q&A, Pinkston discusses topics such as what prompted him to establish his research group, deadlock-free adaptive routing techniques, the importance of CISE’s Expeditions in Computing program, and efforts to broaden participation in computing.
