The CRA Bulletin frequently shares news, timely information about CRA initiatives, and items of interest to the general community.
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Listen to what participants have to say about the inaugural CRA Graduate Cohort for Underrepresented Minorities and Persons with Disabilities (URMD Grad Cohort) in this recently released video.
The Computing Research Association invites nominations for the 2018 CRA Distinguished Service Award and A. Nico Habermann Award.
The CRA Distinguished Service Award is presented to a person or multiple people who have made an outstanding service contribution to the computing research community. The CRA A. Nico Habermann Award is presented to a person or multiple people who have made outstanding contributions aimed at increasing the numbers and/or successes of underrepresented groups in the computing research community.
The Computing Research Association 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.
As a researcher, I am fascinated by the challenge of advancing the high-level foundations of computer software (programming models, compilers, and runtimes) to productively exploit the latest advances in computing systems. While there has been a long tradition of research in this area since the dawn of computing, the rapid evolution of hardware has continuously fueled a need for new software technologies as old approaches quickly become obsolete. Current explorations of new hardware directions that go beyond Moore’s law have further amplified the motivation for this research direction.
From July 16-18, the Computing Research Association (CRA) held its biennial Conference at Snowbird with more than 300 people in attendance. Every two years, the chairs of computing and information departments, as well as the leaders of government and industrial laboratories from across the country and the world, gather in Snowbird, Utah, to network and discuss common issues concerning the future of the field.
Stuart Reges’ recent article entitled “Why Women Don’t Code” elicited strong reactions. I am a colleague of Reges’ in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington (UW). Like a number of my colleagues, I found myself surprised and troubled by his article.
CRA has recently hired Alejandra Guzman as a program associate. In this role, Alejandra supports CRA and CRA-W program activities with meeting planning, workshops, outreach activities, and committee support.
CRA and CRA-W Board Member Ayanna Howard was recently named the recipient of the 2018 Richard A. Tapia Achievement Award for Scientific Scholarship, Civic Science and Diversifying Computing from the Center for Minorities and People with Disabilities in Information Technology (CMD-IT). “The Richard A. Tapia Award is awarded annually to an individual who demonstrates significant research leadership and strong commitment and contributions to diversifying computing.
CRA-W will hold early and mid career mentoring workshops for women on November 3-4 in Phoenix, AZ. The goal of these workshops is to provide an environment for mentoring, practical information, advice, and support among computing researchers.
To achieve their educational mission, computing departments at research universities increasingly depend on full-time teaching faculty who choose teaching as a long-term career. This memo discusses the need for teaching faculty, explores the impact of teaching faculty, and recommends best practices.
For the past 30 years I have had two passions – machine learning (ML) that makes a difference in the real world and increasing diversity in computer science (CS). For the first 26 years, I focused on my first passion and developed new approaches to ML though applications to remote sensing, neuroscience, digital libraries, astrophysics, content-based image retrieval of medical images, computational biology, chemistry, evidence-based medicine, detecting lesions in the MRIs of epilepsy patients, and predicting disease progression for MS patients. For the last four years, my focus has been on my second passion: increasing diversity in CS.
In April, NSF requested input from the research community on a policy change to eliminate/reduce deadlines for core programs in the CISE Directorate, and we passed along your feedback. This month, NSF announced a change to remove deadlines for all proposals to the Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace (SaTC) program.
This work directly follows previous work that analyzed current and future Computer Science needs via advertised tenure-track faculty searches for 2018. This follow-on work looks to understand the relative success of institutions in hiring the tenured/tenure-track faculty in the areas of Computer Science that were being sought.
We are less than two weeks away from the 2018 CRA Conference at Snowbird. CRA is excited to welcome the computing research leadership to this invitation-only biennial conference in Snowbird, Utah July 16-18.
July 1 marked a new fiscal year for CRA. We welcome seven new members to our board of directors: James Allan, Mark Hill, Ayanna Howard, Ran Libeskind-Hadas, Margaret Martonosi, Rachel Pottinger, and Chris Ramming. Retiring from the board as of June 30 are Sarita Adve, Joel Emer, Greg Hager, Julia Hirschberg, H.V. Jagadish, Farnam Jahanian, and Elizabeth Mynatt. CRA would like to thank each of them for contributions during their service on the board.
The National Girls Collaborative Project (NGCP) brings together organizations throughout the United States that are committed to informing and encouraging girls to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering, computer science, and mathematics. NGCP serves more than 35,000 programs in 41 states and uses a collective impact model that builds the capacity of educational programs.
CRA-W recently announced two recipients of the 2018 Borg Early Career Award (BECA) – Reetuparna Das and Yejin Choi.
The fourth (and last NSF-funded) New Computing Faculty Workshops will be held August 5-10, 2018 in San Diego. The goal of the workshops is to help new computing faculty to be better and more efficient teachers. By learning a little about teaching, we will help new faculty (a) make their teaching more efficient and effective and (b) make their teaching more enjoyable. We want students to learn more and teachers to have fun teaching them.
On April 13-14, more than 400 women graduate students in computing from more than 150 institutions converged on San Francisco, CA, for the 2018 CRA-W Graduate Cohort for Women (CRA-W Grad Cohort). Throughout the two-day workshop, professional connections were made, new friendships were formed, and mentoring relationships with senior researchers were established.
CRA’s Education Committee (CRA-E) has recently selected its 2018 CRA-E Graduate Fellow – Robert (“Rob”) Bowden. Rob is a Ph.D. student in computer science at Harvard University. After earning his undergraduate degree at Harvard in 2013, he spent a year working as the course preceptor for Harvard’s CS50 course, and then returned to graduate school with Margo Seltzer as his adviser. Rob’s Ph.D. research includes work on file systems and code synthesis. His current work focuses on how to use the vast amount of CS50 solutions generated by students to not only detect errors in student programs but also propose ways to fix them. Rob’s goal is to advance automated program repair of buggy solutions to introductory programming assignments.
This article and the accompanying figures and tables present the results from the 47th annual CRA Taulbee Survey. The survey, conducted annually by the Computing Research Association, documents trends in student enrollment, degree production, employment of graduates, and faculty salaries in academic units in the United States and Canada that grant the Ph.D. in computer science (CS), computer engineering (CE), or information (I). Most of these academic units are departments, but some are colleges or schools of information or computing.
The Computing Research Association (CRA) is pleased to honor Mary Fernández with the 2018 Service to CRA Award for her work in transforming the visual identity and communications of the organization. Mary was a member of the CRA Board from 2009 to 2015, during which time she spearheaded several key initiatives to re-brand and revitalize communications.
Recently ACM announced that former CRA and CRA-W board member Jan Cuny has been named the recipient of the 2017 ACM Distinguished Service Award. She received the award for the establishment and tireless promotion of projects that have nationally transformed computer science education by increasing and diversifying access to high-quality CS education. From the announcement: When she joined […]
As you prepare to attend the biennial CRA Conference at Snowbird, we invite you to join an important event that is being organized by the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) on Monday, July 16, 2018, from 10:00am to 1:00pm, in Salt Lake City, UT (this event will take place just prior to the main conference, and just a short distance away from Snowbird). This three-hour workshop will be an opportunity for the CISE community – and as department chairs, you all are a key part of this community! – to gather regarding a new effort on Broadening Participation in Computing (BPC). This effort involves the NSF/CISE core research programs, as well as the Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace and Cyber-Physical Systems programs. The effort therefore impacts nearly all faculty who submit proposals to NSF/CISE.
Two recent articles have addressed the shortage of Computer Science professors at many institutions.
Inside Higher Ed featured an article titled “System Crash” on CS student complaints that their departments can’t meet demand. The article highlights the CRA Generation CS Report, the National Academies study, and Craig Wills’ November 2017 CRN article on faculty search results. The article places the concerns of students at specific institutions within the national context.
CRA’s Center for Evaluating the Research Pipeline (CERP) recently underwent staffing changes when former Director Jane Stout left the CRA. Burçin Tamer, Ph.D., is now the Director of CERP and Heather Wright is the Associate Director. Under their leadership, CERP will extend its reach as a resource for the computing community through its Data Buddies Project, evaluation services, and other activities. Heather and Burçin are both excited to make contributions to the computing community and drive the broader mission of CRA to facilitate the development of strong, diverse talent in the field.
CRA-W is now accepting applications for the Collaborative Research Experience for Undergraduates (CREU) program. Application Deadline: May 18.
Former CRA Board Chair Dan Reed has been named senior vice president for academic affairs at the University of Utah.
Our friends at the National Science Foundation (NSF) have asked for research community input on a proposed policy change to eliminate/reduce deadlines for core programs in the CISE Directorate. Given the increased pressures on securing federal funding and, in some cases, reduced capacity for grant management at computing research institutions, do you think the Computer & Information Science & Engineering (CISE) Directorate should follow the lead of the BIO and GEO directorates and consider eliminating or reducing deadlines for proposal submissions? What positive or negative impact could such a shift have on our community?
Approximately 100 graduate students in computing and more than 20 speakers assembled on March 16-17 in San Diego, CA, to convene the inaugural CRA Graduate Cohort for Underrepresented Minorities and Persons with Disabilities (URMD Grad Cohort). It was the first gathering of its kind hosted by CRA. This new iteration of the Grad Cohort Workshop focused on the following underrepresented groups in computing: Alaska Native, Black/African American, Hispanic, Native American, Native Hawaiian and other Pacific Islander, and persons with disabilities. The workshop aimed to increase representation from these groups in computing research by building and mentoring nationwide communities through their graduate studies, and is modeled on the highly successful CRA-W Grad Cohort Workshop for Women.
