CRA Bulletin

The CRA Bulletin frequently shares news, timely information about CRA initiatives, and items of interest to the general community.
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CRA Launches BPCnet.org: A Resource Portal for Broadening Participation in Computing Efforts


In partnership with the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Center for Women in Information Technology (NCWIT), CRA announces an initial launch of BPCnet.org, a resource portal designed to amplify the NSF CISE Directorate’s efforts in broadening participation in computing (BPC). CRA anticipates that BPCnet.org will provide a much-needed clearinghouse for the community to learn about and engage with ongoing projects to diversify computing.

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2019 CRA Board Election Results and FY20 Executive Committee


CRA members have elected three new members to its board of directors: Lorrie Cranor, Divesh Srivastava and Marvin Theimer. The CRA board of directors has elected new board officers to serve two-year terms beginning July 1, 2019. At the February board meeting, Ellen Zegura was elected chair; Nancy Amato was elected vice-chair; Ran Libeskind-Hadas was elected secretary; and James Allan was elected treasurer.

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Jennifer Rexford and Westley Weimer Receive the 2019 CRA-E Undergraduate Research Faculty Mentoring Award


The Education Committee of the Computing Research Association (CRA-E) is proud to announce two recipients of the 2019 CRA-E Undergraduate Research Faculty Mentoring Award: Jennifer Rexford from Princeton University and Westley Weimer from the University of Michigan. 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.

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CCC Launches the “Catalyzing Computing” Podcast


The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is launching the “Catalyzing Computing” podcast, which will focus on topics of interests within the computing research community. The podcast is hosted by CCC Program Associate Khari Douglas and will feature interviews with researchers and policy makers about their background and experiences in the computing community. You can stream or download the podcast on Soundcloud now.

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CRA Board Member Highlight: Barbara G. Ryder


My computer science research career started during my college internship at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey, during the early 1970s in the center that later produced UNIX and the portable C compiler. This experience taught me that computing was broader than the introduction to scientific programming in my undergraduate studies in applied math. (There was no computer science undergraduate major at the time.) For most of my career, I was interested in deriving descriptions of program execution behaviors from code in order, for example, to optimize program time and/or memory performance, to validate desirable properties such as correctness or data security, or to refactor code for ease of maintenance.

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CRA Board Member Highlight: Rachel Pottinger


Increasingly, jobs rely on the ability to use computers to interpret, understand, and trust data. For example, my students and I have worked with ornithologists who cannot understand the representations of their bird sightings, civil engineers who cannot easily use their own building data, finance experts who cannot trace money between companies and their subsidiaries, and an XML document company whose clients cannot understand data that appears outside of their reports. In each case, the data users have been hampered because their data is exceedingly difficult to understand and trust, even though the users are experts in their fields. One reason for this difficulty is that the organization of the data is often designed for computers, not for people (i.e., for storage, not accessibility). Another reason is that data often come from different sources, leaving users with the challenge of integrating data that they neither understand nor trust.

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2019 Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award Winners


Congratulations to the recipients of the 2019 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.

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Forbes America’s Top 50 Women in Tech List


Three CRA contributors were recently recognized on Forbes America’s Top 50 Women in Tech List. From Forbes: “The Top 50 Women In Tech is an unranked assessment of technologists in five categories: Moguls, Founders, Innovators, Engineers and Warriors. The list showcases the breadth and depth of entrepreneurial women who are changing the world.” CRA and […]

AAAS Honors 2018 Elected Fellows


The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) recently announced its 2018 Elected Fellows. The Fellows are recognized with this lifetime honor for their extraordinary achievements in advancing science. Several individuals involved with CRA have been elected Fellows to the Section on Information, Computing & Communication.

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CRA Board Member Highlight: Jaime Teevan


Research shows that it takes 25 minutes to reach full productivity after an interruption, yet we are interrupted every 3 minutes. And even without external interruptions, our focus is fragmented. We look at any given desktop window for an average of only 40 seconds, constantly self-interrupting to check email or Facebook. We also try to complete multiple tasks at once, even though we all know that multitasking typically fails. Our tendency to be easily distracted kept our hunter-and-gatherer ancestors alive when they needed to attend to potential predators, but now, in the safety of our offices, it is amazing we manage to get anything done. Chances are you won’t even read this entire article in one go.

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Former Board Member Sarita Adve Named Recipient of the ACM-IEEE CS Ken Kennedy Award


Former CRA Board Member Sarita Adve (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) was recently named the 2018 recipient of the ACM-IEEE CS Ken Kennedy Award. She is being recognized “for research contributions and leadership in the development of memory consistency models for C++ and Java, for service to numerous computer science organizations, and for exceptional mentoring.” […]

New from CRA: Database of Candidates for Academic and Industrial/Government Laboratory Positions


The number of faculty openings in computing has increased significantly in recent years, which has placed stress on the faculty recruiting process. Both academic departments and faculty candidates go through an arduous process. CRA has started a new service intended to improve the recruiting process for academic and industrial/government laboratory research positions. Candidates for these positions […]

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Applications Open for 2019 Graduate Cohort Workshops


We will again host two Graduate Cohort Workshops in 2019. The CRA URMD Grad Cohort Workshop is designed specifically for underrepresented minorities in computing and persons with disabilities in graduate school in computing fields. The CRA-W Grad Cohort Workshop is designed for women students in their first, second, or third year of graduate school in computing fields. The workshops will include a mix of formal presentations, informal discussions and social events. By attending Grad Cohort, participants will be able to build mentoring relationships and develop peer networks that are intended to form the basis for ongoing activities during their graduate career and beyond. Both applications are open now and will close on November 15.

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CRA-E Graduate Fellows Program Accepting Nominations


The Computing Research Association Education Committee (CRA-E) is now accepting applications for the CRA-E Graduate Fellows Program. The program opportunities for Ph.D. candidates in a computing field to contribute to CRA-E projects, to network with computer science education advocates on the committee, and to engage in advocacy for mentoring undergraduate students and promote computer science research and undergraduate education at the national level.

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Nominations Open for 2019 CRA-E Undergraduate Research Faculty Mentoring Award


The CRA-E Undergraduate Research Faculty Mentoring Award honors faculty members in computing who have made a significant impact on students they have mentored. It recognizes those who have provided exceptional mentorship and undergraduate research experiences and, in parallel, guidance on admission and matriculation of these students to research-focused graduate programs in computing.

CRA Taulbee Survey Announcement


The 2018 CRA Taulbee Survey will be starting soon. As has been our recent practice, the survey will be split into two parts, salary and main (everything else). This allows us to set an earlier deadline for the salary section in order to produce a preliminary salary report in December, while giving departments more time to collect and enter the information in the rest of the survey if needed.

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CRA is hiring a Deputy Director for the Computing Community Consortium


The Computing Research Association seeks a highly motivated individual to serve as a Deputy Director for the Computing Community Consortium. The Deputy Director works with the CCC Director, Council Members, and the CRA staff to ensure that the CCC succeeds in its mission: to serve as a catalyst and enabler for the computing research community, to provide mechanisms for the community to identify compelling research visions for the future of the field and to articulate those visions to key stakeholders.

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iAAMCS Releases Guidelines for Successfully Mentoring Black/African-American Computing Sciences Doctoral Students


These guidelines were established to articulate successful strategies for mentoring African-American doctoral students in Computing Sciences (CS). iAAMCS defines “student mentoring” as the process of supporting, encouraging and guiding students’ academic and social progress with the goal of facilitating career and personal development. Grounded in project-based results and similar empirical research, the following guidelines emerged: (1) recruit strategically, (2) establish community, (3) foster a research culture, (4) provide holistic advising, (5) provide funding and (6) promote professional development. iAAMCS hopes that institutions, departments and faculty use these guidelines to bolster the participation of African-American students pursuing doctoral degrees in CS.

Although the iAAMCS Guidelines serve as best practices for mentoring African-American students in computing, these strategies are useful for optimal mentoring all students.