CRA Update: Snowbird Theme Reveal! Plus: Your Chance to Nominate Future CRA Leaders to Attend
By Tracy Camp, Executive Director and CEO
Before you know it, it will be time for the 2024 CRA Conference! To be held this year in Snowbird, Utah from July 23-25, the 2024 CRA Conference will be a can’t-miss event for leaders from CRA member institutions, including chairs/heads/deans of computing departments/schools and leaders from U.S. industrial and government computing research laboratories and centers.
As an invitation-only conference, the CRA Conference is a unique opportunity for computing research leaders across North America to gather, network, and address common issues in the field. If you haven’t already, click here to add the conference to your Google calendar. Leaders from CRA member institutions should keep an eye out for their email invitations to register in the near future.
Conference Theme Reveal
And now, the conference co-chairs are pleased to reveal the theme of this year’s conference: generative AI.
“Generative AI was selected as the theme for this year’s CRA Conference for the simple reason that it’s in the midst of a once-in-a-generation boom,” said Divesh Srivastava, conference co-chair, CRA board member, and head of database research at AT&T Labs. “Generative AI is a topic that is not only timely, but one that cuts across the multiple constituencies that the CRA Conference serves. It’s a topic that we need the whole community to engage with, not just the companies with the budgets to develop it.”
“It’s exciting because this new technology will allow us to do so many new things, but of course there are good and bad sides,” said Maria Gini, conference co-chair, CRA board member, and professor of computer science at the University of Minnesota. “The CRA Conference is the perfect opportunity to bring together the whole community–academia, industry, and government–to have the hard and important discussions, to better understand the dangers and implications, and grapple with the ethics of this very powerful tool.”
New! Nominate Future CRA Leaders to Attend
In an effort to help develop the pipeline of future leaders in computing and create points of connection between senior and more junior researchers from across organizations, the conference co-chairs and the CRA Board of Directors are excited to announce the Future CRA Leaders Program.
As a new initiative for the 2024 conference, a select number of researchers who have demonstrated the potential to be a future leader in the field will be selected to attend the 2024 CRA Conference as a part of the inaugural cohort of the Future CRA Leaders Program. Individuals of all levels of seniority may be nominated.
In addition to being full conference attendees with access to attend sessions and network with senior leaders, Future CRA Leaders will receive special recognition during the conference’s opening session and be invited to an exclusive Future CRA Leaders networking event. The researchers selected for this opportunity will also present a lightning talk on a computing research topic of their choosing during a special Future CRA Leaders conference session.
“My fellow co-chairs and I are very excited to introduce this new opportunity for Future CRA Leaders to be a part of the important discussions that will take place at this year’s conference,” said Rachel Pottinger, conference co-chair, CRA board member, and professor of computer science at the University of British Columbia. “The people we hope to attract with this opportunity are the researchers who will carry computer science research into the future, and it’s our hope that their experience at the conference will be additive to their development, whether it be by sparking an interest in a new research direction, the start of a new research partnership, or simply making new connections and friendships.”
If you would like to nominate a researcher to be a Future CRA Leader, complete this form by March 15, 2024. Nominations must be completed by a CRA member primary contact (e.g., department chair), and each member unit may submit only one nomination for consideration.
Reach out to snowbird@cra.org with any questions.
