This article is published in the May 2006 issue.

CRA Welcomes New Board Members


CRA recently elected four new members to its board of directors. Annie Antón (North Carolina State University), Eric Grimson (MIT), Andrew Chien(Intel), and Robert Sproull (Sun Microsystems Laboratories) will serve three-year terms beginning July 1, 2006.

Five current board members were re-elected to three-year terms: William Aspray (Indiana University), Carla Ellis (Duke University), Marc Snir (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign), Jeffrey Vitter (Purdue University), and Bryant York (Portland State University).

Past Chair Jim Foley retires June 30 after ten years of extraordinary service on the CRA board, including three years as Treasurer and four as Chair. His contributions have helped make CRA the active organization it is today, and he will be greatly missed.

Also completing terms on the board on June 30, 2006 are Randy Bryant (Carnegie Mellon University), John King (University of Michigan), Alfred Spector (IBM), and Wim Sweldens (Lucent Technologies, Bell Labs). All have been active members of the board, and we thank them for their service to CRA and the community.

Newly Elected

Annie I. Antón, a graduate of the Georgia Institute of Technology with a Ph.D. in computer science, is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at North Carolina State University. Among her awards and honors are: CSO (Chief Security Officer) Magazine “Woman of Influence in the Public Sector” Award (2005); Member of the 9th IDA/DARPA Defense Science Study Group (2004-05); IEEE Senior Member (2003); and NSF CAREER Award (2000-04).

Professor Antón is a Member of the NSF CISE Advisory Committee. She is a Member of CRA-W, and since 1999 has mentored six students in its Distributed Mentor Project. She has been both a participant and a speaker in CRA-W’s Cohort of Associate Professors Project (CAPP). In 2002, Antón was appointed a CRA Digital Government Fellow. She was an active participant in CRA’s Grand Research Challenges in Information Security & Assurance Conference in 2003, accompanying the briefing team to Capitol Hill and the National Press Club. She serves on several committees and boards.

Eric Grimson is Head of the EECS Department, Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, and since 1998 the Bernard Gordon Professor of Medical Engineering at MIT. He is a Ph.D. graduate of MIT in Mathematics (Artificial Intelligence.)

Professor Grimson is an AAAI Fellow and an IEEE Fellow. In 2001 he won the Bose Award for Excellence in Teaching from the School of Engineering at MIT. He has served as general chair or program chair of major computer vision and medical image analysis conferences (CVPR 2000, ICCV 1995, MICCAI 1998). Grimson was Associate Director of the MIT AI Lab from 1998 to 2003 and Education Officer for the EECS Department from 2001 to 2004. He brings to the board his experience as part of a long tradition of innovation and engagement in initiatives in CS research and education in MIT’s EECS department.

Andrew Chien is Vice President and Director of Intel Research. His awards and honors include Fellow, Association of Computing Machinery (2004); endowed Chair in Computer Science and Engineering, UCSD (1998); Xerox Outstanding Senior Faculty Award (1996); NSF Young Investigator Award (1994); and numerous Best Paper/Finalist Awards (1992-2004). He is a graduate of MIT with a Ph.D. in Computer Science.

Dr. Chien was Founding Director of the UCSD Center for Networked Systems (2003-05); Chair and Member, Steering Group, IEEE Conference on High Performance Distributed Computing (2002-05); Member, Steering Group, Global Grid Forum (2003); Chair, Peer to Peer Working Group (industry association) (2001-03); and Member, Steering Group, ACM SIGPLAN Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming (1999-present). He brings to the board an interest in sustaining and supporting investment in computing research, encouraging the development of young research leaders, and continuing the increase in diversity of the computing research community.

Robert F. Sproull is a Fellow at Sun Microsystems Laboratories. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2002) and a Member of the National Academy of Engineering (1997). Sproull was a member of the organizing committee for CRA’s Grand Challenges in Information Systems Conference in 2002.

Prior to joining Sun in 1990, Dr. Sproull was an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, and before that a Member of the Research Staff at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. He has been a Technology Partner of Advanced Technology Associates since 1981. His research interests include computer graphics, distributed computing and VLSI design. Sproull received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University.

CRA Welcomes New Board Members