2018 CRA Conference at Snowbird is Almost Here!

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.

The event kicks off on the evening of Monday, July 16 with an opening reception, awards presentations, and dinner followed by the first plenary talk entitled “The Past is Prologue: A New Golden Age for Computer Architecture,” by David Patterson (University of California–Berkeley/Google), co-recipient of this year’s ACM Turing Award.

On Tuesday, July 17, we will learn about diversity in leadership from a plenary panel of academic and industry experts who will examine the challenges and opportunities in retaining diverse employees, and further, efforts needed to ensure leadership paths in industry and academia for diverse members of staff/faculty. In “Increasing Diversity in Computing is Easier Than You Think: Some Small Steps that Make a Big Difference,” a subsequent panel will consider a number of common questions that colleges and universities face in trying to increase diversity in the population of computing students. Additional parallel sessions on Tuesday include “Growing a CS Department into a School/College of Computing,” “Department Rankings,” and “Using CRA Data to Improve Your Department and Inform Decision Making.” After networking activities, including guided hikes and reading group discussions, conference attendees will hear talks on “Online Disinformation During Crisis Events” and “Machine Learning for Science” organized by CRA’s Computing Community Consortium (CCC).

On Wednesday, July 18, the day’s sessions will open with a plenary talk by Raquel Urtasun (University of Toronto/Uber Advanced Technologies Group) entitled “Towards Affordable Self-Driving Cars.” Parallel sessions on Wednesday include “Self-driving Cars: When Will They Become Mainstream,” “Booming Faculty,” “New Models for Industrial Research in CS,” and “How Bias and Harassment Drive Women Out of Computing.”

The final session of the conference will be “Making a Federal Case for Computing,” in which CRA’s Peter Harsha will discuss how CRA is supporting the computing research community’s interests in Washington. Harsha will attempt to make sense of the seemingly chaotic political landscape and discuss how CRA and CRA’s partners in the science advocacy community are contending with it. Harsha will also talk about opportunities for members of the computing research community to engage in the political process at a variety of different levels and intensities.

The conference agenda, now including session descriptions and room locations, is available at https://cra.org/cra/events/2018-cra-conference-snowbird/#agenda.

This event will be using the Whova mobile app. While at the event, check the app for the latest agenda updates and more.