The CRA-Industry Committee started a series of 75-minute virtual roundtable meetings in July 2021 focused on issues of interest to our computing research industry partners. These meetings will be used to seed additional CRA-Industry activities, publicize the CRA-Industry committee, and attract potential companies to participate. Sign up here for more information.

Virtual Roundtable on Corporate Responsibility and Computing Research
July 14, 2021

Today, more companies are deliberately extending their social responsibility initiatives at the behest of investors, customers, and employees. How should industry be viewing and factoring societal equity into its research agendas? This virtual roundtable explored the concept, principles, and best practices of socially responsible computing research. Ideally, participants will gain a sense of considerations that might apply to their strategic research planning by developing a broad framework for the concept of research equity that goes beyond recent examples in machine learning.

Virtual Roundtable on Best Practices on using the Cloud for Computing Research
September 15, 2021
See a blog post recap of this roundtable here.

A major focus in computing research across industry, academia, and government is to advance the frontiers of computing by experimenting with leading-edge compute platforms.  This was initially at odds with early instances of cloud/warehouse computing that focused on deploying commodity rather than state-of-the-art systems.  However, cloud computing platforms have advanced significantly during the last two decades to the point where there are now many notable examples of their use in research.  Further, the cloud’s “pay as you go” model has proved attractive for research related to machine learning and data analytics that benefit from elastic provisioning of resources. It is noteworthy that NSF has extended its CloudBank portal with a CloudBank Catalog with links to commercial cloud services that can be paid from NSF grants. Hence, increased use of the cloud for computing research could offer new revenue opportunities to cloud providers, in addition to joint research across industry and academia. There will also likely be a crossover from the use of cloud computing for research to its use in teaching, thereby making future generations of computing professionals more accustomed to cloud platforms. 

The purpose of this virtual roundtable was to discuss best practices on using the cloud for computing research and the resulting synergistic opportunities across industry, academia, and government. 

Virtual Roundtable on Research and Decision Horizons in the Semiconductor Technology Ecosystem
Date: TBD

The purpose of this virtual roundtable is to identify principles and opportunities for cross-stack research collaboration in computing, with particular attention to synergies between process technology, design, systems, and applications. Analogous to the national academies “tire track” diagram, which shows the interplay between academic research, industry, and government with several “long distance” paths between disciplines, we hope to come to a better understanding of how to identify and foster opportunities for “long distance” leaps between layers of the computing stack. The virtual roundtable will review the history of NVRAM as a motivating example, and consider industry decision timeframes as a key issue in identifying and realizing research collaboration opportunities.