Archive of articles published in the 2008 issue.

Internships Enhance Student Research and Educational Experiences

By: Joann J. OrdilleIn: /

Government and industrial internships can enhance the retention of students in the computer science pipeline by augmenting the educational and research experiences they receive in school. In academic programs with large numbers of students where personal attention from professors may be limited, an internship can provide one-on-one or small-group mentoring from a computer science researcher or professional. Internships can provide access to equipment, training, expertise or other resources that may not be readily available in the academic environment

Read more →
CRA-WPExpanding the Pipeline

A7: Anytime Anywhere Affordable Access to Anything by Anyone Authorized

In: /

Imagine a world where computers are everywhere—we use them everywhere, but we see them nowhere because they are either invisible to the naked eye or so visible they are taken for granted. Ubiquitous computing has been a dream since the late 1980s and is a reality today—to a degree. Looking ahead, computing will become even more ubiquitous along many dimensions, and for each dimension, at multiple scales.

Read more →
CRA

CCC Update

In: /

The Computing Community Consortium (http://www.cra.org/ccc/) was established by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to enable the computing research community to build research communities focused on exciting new visions for computing research. One piece of this effort is the funding of area-specific workshops in which researchers and potential funders come together to discuss research visions, lay out research road maps, and increase momentum for the area. Here we provide a brief synopsis of the ongoing efforts.

Read more →
CCC

These Are Interesting Times Indeed

In: /

That awful gurgling noise you hear in the background is the global economy draining through the hole that is the U.S. subprime mortgage crisis. We do not yet know how bad the economic downturn will be. However, if history is a guide, we can expect the weakened economy to depress rates of return on university endowments, tighten state budgets due to decreased tax revenues, constrain corporate R&D spending, and increase the already large pressure on federal government discretionary spending. In short, we are likely to experience constraints on faculty and researcher hiring and on overall education and research funding.

Read more →
CRA

CISE Bytes

In: /

We are pleased to introduce CISE Bytes, the first in a series of columns from Jeannette Wing, Assistant Director of NSF for CISE. They will provide brief items of interest about the people in CISE and activities within the directorate.

Read more →
CRA

Science Does Poorly in Funding Stopgap

In: /

After failing to meet the end-of-fiscal-year deadline on the annual appropriations bills necessary to keep the Federal government functioning, Congress and the Administration agreed on a stopgap funding measure in late September that will ensure that Federal science agencies in 2009 will face a fourth straight year of reduced budgets.

Read more →
GovAffairs

Best Practices in Promotion and Tenure of Interdisciplinary Faculty

In: /

Interdisciplinary research and education is an increasingly important feature of the academic landscape. The fields of computing and information science and engineering are no exception: CISE researchers collaborate with electrical engineers in the design of low-power chips; with linguists in the development of natural-language processing systems; with education experts on the use of digital technologies in formal and informal education; with biologists in the exploration of the genetic code; with economists in the formation of theories of on-line commerce; and with statisticians in the discovery of new ways to extract information from rich sets of data—to name just a few examples. Some of these efforts have even led to the establishment of new disciplines, such as bioinformatics and data mining. While “core” areas of computation, such as operating systems, programming languages, networking, and others, will continue to produce key advances, there is an emergent agreement among computer and information scientists that close interactions with other disciplines are essential to the health and advancement of our field.

Read more →
CRA

Research, Teaching and Service: Dynamic Balance

In: /

You are a newly minted Ph.D. recipient who landed a faculty position at a research university. The fall semester is just beginning, and you are simultaneously excited and a bit apprehensive. University life is unchanged and also surprisingly new—writing research proposals, teaching classes and serving on faculty committees. Your friends and new colleagues are giving you sometimes conflicting advice on time management and priorities. What really matters? How do you choose? How do you find your own path?

Read more →
CRAMusings from the Chair

CS Majors Ten Years After Graduation

In: /

There are few good sources of information about what happens to undergraduates after they receive their degrees. One is the National Center for Education Statistics‘ Baccalaureate and Beyond Longitudinal Study (B&B). The most recent B&B report provides snapshots of work and life experiences in 1994, 1997 and 2003 for those who received undergraduate degrees in 1992-93. It divides majors into those that are “academic” or “career-oriented”, with computer science (CS) included in the latter (along with business, education, health, and engineering).

Read more →
CRA