Published: January 2014, Issue: Vol. 26/No.1, Download as PDF
Archive of articles published in the January 2014, Vol. 26/No.1 issue.
President Barack Obama has announced his intent to nominate two new members to the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST). The new appointees are J. Michael McQuade, Senior Vice President of Science and Technology at United Technologies Corporation and Susan L. Graham.
Click here to download the 2012-13 CRA Annual report.
ITiCSE 2014, the 19th Annual Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education, will take place in Uppsala, Sweden, hosted by Uppsala University. The ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE) is sponsoring the event.
CRA is pleased to announce that Brian Mosley has joined its staff as a Policy Analyst. In this position, Brian will track a number of issues of importance to the computing community, including Robotics R&D, STEM Education issues, and policies surrounding Open Access and Open Data efforts at the Federal level. He’ll also be a part of CRA’s efforts to engage more computing researchers in the policy process like CRA’s Fall Congressional Fly-in and the CRA/CCC Leadership in Science Policy Institute, and work closely with CRA’s Director of Government Affairs, Peter Harsha, on the rest of the CRA issues portfolio.
This year’s nominees were a very impressive group. A number of them were commended for making significant contributions to more than one research project, several were authors or coauthors on multiple papers, others had made presentations at major conferences, and some had produced software artifacts that were in widespread use. Many of nominees had been involved in successful summer research or internship programs, many had been teaching assistants, tutors, or mentors, and a number had significant involvement in community volunteer efforts. CRA gratefully acknowledges the support of Microsoft Research and Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs (MERL) who sponsor the Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award program in alternate years. Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs is the sponsor of this year’s awards.
Before Congress wrapped up its work for 2013 and headed home for the December holidays, House and Senate lawmakers reached an agreement on FY 2014 and FY 2015 budget numbers that would avert sequester levels by providing about $63 billion of cap relief over both years. The agreement, brokered by House Budget Chair Paul Ryan (R-WI) and Senate Budget Chair Patty Murray (D-WA), provides sequester relief that includes an additional $22 billion for non-defense discretionary spending in FY 2014 and $19 billion in FY 2015, meaning that appropriators will have some added room to provide funding for federal science agencies like the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, National Institute of Standards and Technology and Department of Energy, should they choose to.
The biennial CRA Conference at Snowbird is the flagship invitation-only conference for the leadership of the North American computing research community.
There are two new additions to the CRA Board of Directors. As of January 1, 2014, Andrew Sears, is the new ACM Representative, replacing Norm Jouppi. Ken Barker (University of Calgary) is the new CACS/AIC Representative, replacing Tamer Öszu. Their bios are below. CRA thanks Jouppi and Öszu for their service.
NSF launched new funding opportunity to explore using large data sets to improve STEM teaching and learning environments with a radically different funding mechanism – participation in an Ideas Lab workshop which is designed to foster novel, transformative, multidisciplinary approaches (and proposals).
On November 16, 2013, in Denver, CO, the Broader Engagement (BE) Program at the Supercomputing conference opened its doors the day before SC13 to begin this year’s growing event. Kicking off the workshop, three key inclusion activities provided a solid introduction for newcomers to the SC experience.
The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) has spent the first half of the academic year ramping up its activities for the computing research community. In the beginning of the year, CCC released two requests for proposals: one for the Implementation of Best Practices for Postdocs in our field and one for new Visioning Activities. Both programs received submissions that are currently being reviewed. Look for announcements in both of these areas on the CCC blog in the coming weeks.
