Published: May 2014,  Issue: Vol. 26/No.5, Download as PDF

Archive of articles published in the May 2014, Vol. 26/No.5 issue.

The NCWIT Scorecard: A Report on the Status of Women in Information Technology

By: Wendy M. DuBow, Director of Evaluation, National Center for Women in Information TechnologyIn: /

In the last 10 years, the computing community has started paying more attention to the lack of gender diversity in the field. There have been myriad programs introduced to amend the problem, including awareness-raising campaigns, out-of-school and in-school courses, workshops, and camps. At the national level, there are policy movements to include computer science as a high school graduation requirement, new recruitment practices and other organizational reforms introduced at the university and industry levels, and more. Many of these movements have been evaluated, and many have shown promise that they have, or will, make a difference in their local context. However, to understand whether or not all of these interventions, taken together, have actually “moved the needle,” we need to review the longitudinal data. How have girls’ and women’s representation in computing at the various levels changed, if at all, over time? And are we seeing any positive trends?

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CRA-WPExpanding the Pipeline

Collaborative research environments in computing

In: /

Forty four undergraduate students from underrepresented populations in computing (i.e., women + men of minority racial/ethnic groups) and 26 undergraduate students from well-represented populations in computing (i.e., Asian + White men) who had recently completed a summer NSF research experience for undergraduate students (REU) reported (a) how collaborative their REU had been and (b) interest in pursuing a research career later in life. Well-represented students reported strong interest in a research career, regardless of the degree to which their REU was collaborative. However, underrepresented students’ interest was related to the collaborative nature of their REU, such that experience with a more collaborative REUs was associated with more interest in pursuing a research career later on. This finding suggests that collaborative research environments in computing may be more important for underrepresented students’ persistence in computing research careers than is the case for well-represented students.

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CERP

Extreme Scale Design Automation

In: /

The following is a special contribution to this blog by Josep Torrellas, Professor at the Departments of Computer Science and (by courtesy) Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the Director of the Center for Programmable Extreme Scale Computing, and the Director of the Illinois-Intel Parallelism Center (I2PC). Josep is a member of the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council.

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CCC

2013 Taulbee Survey

In: /

This article and the accompanying figures and tables present the results from the 43rd annual CRA Taulbee Survey.The CRA Taulbee Survey is conducted annually by the Computing Research Association to document trends in student enrollment, degree production, employment of graduates, and faculty salaries in academic units in the United States and Canada that grant the Ph.D. in computer science (CS), computer engineering (CE) or information (I). Most of these academic units are departments, but some are colleges or schools of information or computing. In this report, we will use the term “department” to refer to the unit offering the program.

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CRA

CCC to hold a workshop on Human Computation

In: /

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) will hold a Human Computation Roadmap Summit to explore the past and prospective impact of human computation (HC) and to identify the research areas and activities that will directly lead to the most beneficial societal outcomes. The goal of the workshop is to produce a national research roadmap for HC that will be briefed to the Hill toward new research funding and a national HC initiative.

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CCC

Visions 2025: The New Making Renaissance: Programmable Matter and Things

In: /

The Visions 2025 initiative is intended to inspire the computing community to envision future trends and opportunities in computing research. Where is the computing field going over the next 10-15 years? What are potential opportunities, disruptive trends, and blind spots? Are there new questions and directions that deserve greater attention by the research community and new investments in computing research?

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CCC