“Valuing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Our Computing Community” Panel on March 3rd

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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).

Panel Abstract: There is a movement occurring broadly across many scientific and engineering fields, including widely within our computing community, toward making tangible progress through intentional actions and interventions for advancing and valuing diversity, equity, and inclusion.  There is also a movement toward dismantling structural and/or systemic factors—especially but not limited to racial and gender biases—that may be standing in the way of making much needed progress in advancing and valuing diversity, equity, and inclusion fully.  Similar to those in other technical fields, we as a computing community are faced with the persistent key question: What more can and should be done?  At this panel (see full description here), which is broadly accessible to the larger computing community, this and other important questions will be discussed by a stellar set of world-renowned computing researchers who value diversity, equity, and inclusion.  From this open and lively discussion, our hope is attendees will be better positioned to make measurable progress in bringing about continual, significant, and sustained change that shall enable gainful strides in further valuing diversity, equity and inclusion within our computing community.

The panel session is free and open to the public. Register here.

The panel consists of the following distinguished and renowned leaders:

  • John L. Hennessy
    Former Stanford President and Chairman of Alphabet, 2017 ACM Turing Awardee
  • David Patterson
    Former CRA Board Chair, Berkeley Professor and Google Distinguished Engineer, 2017 ACM Turing Awardee
  • Margaret Martonosi
    Former CRA Board Member and CRA-WP Co-Chair, Princeton Professor and NSF Assistant Director of CISE
  • Bill Dally
    NVIDIA Chief Scientist and former Stanford Professor
  • Natalie Enright Jerger
    2015 CRA-WP Borg Early Career Award Winner, University of Toronto Professor and ACM’s Council on Diversity and Inclusion Co-Chair
  • Kim Hazelwood
    CRA Board Member, West Coast Head of Engineering at Facebook AI Research
  • Timothy M. Pinkston (Moderator)
    CRA Board Member, USC Professor and Vice Dean

“This is only the second main program session in these conferences’ history that focuses on a topic related to diversity and broadening participation in computing generally, with the first occurring at the 2018 joint HPCA/PPoPP/CGO lunch session panel on “Women in Academia and Industry.” While this may be the only other time that a main program session has been devoted to a diversity-related topic at any of the major computer architecture conferences—including ISCA, MICRO, and ASPLOS—and possibly one of only a few times at any of the other major conferences in the computing field more broadly, we hope this will not be the last time. Momentum has been building toward this moment over recent years and especially over the past few months, on many fronts. Several notable developments, of countless many, that have brought us to this point are chronicled and highlighted below. But first, it’s useful to review what is commonly understood by the terms diversity, equity, and inclusion, within the context of this article.”

Read more here.