Archive of articles published in the 2017 issue.

SandhyaSandhya

Expanding the Pipeline: Interview with Sandhya Dwarkadas


Sandhya Dwarkadas is the Albert Arendt Hopeman Professor of Engineering and and Chair of the Computer Science Department at the University of Rochester, with a secondary appointment in Electrical and Computer Engineering. Dwarkadas has made contributions to hardware- and software-based shared memory implementations and system reconfigurability, and has 12 U.S. patents. She is a CRA-W board member, and is currently on the editorial board of CACM Research Highlights and IEEE Micro.

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CCC @ AAAS 2017- Health in Your Pocket: Diagnosing and Treating Disease with Smartphones


The AAAS annual meeting is an opportunity for scientists across the spectrum to come together and communicate the importance and excitement of science to the general public. This year’s meeting, which took place in Boston on February 16-20, 2017, had the theme of Serving Science Through Science Policy, a natural fit for the Computing Community Consortium (CCC). CCC Council Members Beth Mynatt, Shwetak Patel, and Gregory Hager provided a press briefing on diagnosing and treating disease with smartphones. This blog post is the first in a series discussing the panels and presentations highlighting the contributions of computing to science and society.

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CCC White Paper- Safety, Security, and Privacy Threats Posed by Accelerating Trends in the Internet of Things


The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Computing in the Physical World Task Force recently published a white paper on Safety, Security, and Privacy Threats Posted by Accelerating Trends in the Internet of Things. In the report, the authors highlight some of the new challenges created by smart devices and collections of devices and they argue that issues related to security, physical safety, privacy, and usability are tightly interconnected. Research is needed in helping manage complexity and that connects usability concerns with safety, security, and privacy. More comprehensive safety and security standards for individual devices based on existing technology are needed. Likewise, research that determines the best way for individuals, small businesses, and small organizations to confidently manage collections of devices must guide the future deployments of such systems.

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Nanotechnology-Inspired Information Processing Systems Workshop Report


The organizing committee for the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) sponsored Nanotechnology-Inspired Information Processing Systems has released their workshop report. The workshop, held in September 2016, brought together over 40 leading researchers from the areas of computing, neuroscience, systems, architecture, integrated circuits, and nanoscience, to come up with new ideas for the future of information processing platforms on beyond-CMOS nanoscale technologies that can approach the energy efficiency and the decision‐making capacity of the human brain.

CCC White Paper- Advances in Artificial Intelligence Require Progress Across all of Computer Science


Many recent symposia and workshops have highlighted both the progress and opportunities for AI and its potential to contribute to new products, services, and experiences. However, we should not lose sight of the fact that fielding real-world systems that realize these innovations will also drive significant advances in virtually all areas of computing, including areas that are not traditionally recognized as being important to AI research and development. To highlight these synergies, the CCC AI and Robotics Task Force released a white paper for the community.

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Generation CS: Report on CS Enrollment


In early 2015, CRA created a committee to investigate increasing enrollments. As part of this effort, an institutional subgroup of this committee developed and distributed a CRA Enrollment Survey to better understand enrollment trends and their impact. A report Generation CS: CS Undergraduate Enrollments Surge Since 2006 presents and analyzes the data collected.

Undergraduate Research Opportunity Listing Service


The Computing Research Association’s Education Committee (CRA-E) is pleased to announce the “Undergraduate Research Listing Service.” This free service is now available for faculty and other researchers to advertise undergraduate research opportunities and for undergraduates to find such opportunities.  The site can be found here: http://conquer.cra.org/research-opportunities.

This site can be used to advertise individual summer positions, research programs, and any other opportunities for undergraduates to engage in research in the computing field. If you have a research opportunity available, please post it here: http://conquer.cra.org/post-a-research-opportunity.

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Expanding the Pipeline: Characteristics of Male and Female Prospective Computer Science Majors – Examining Four Decades of Changes


Several years ago, after devoting many years to the study of the gender gap in STEM fields using nationwide data on first-year college students, it became clear to me that the study of STEM in the “aggregate” was no longer a realistic or useful way to examine women’s progress in these fields. Not only does women’s representation in undergraduate STEM vary dramatically by field (constituting as many as 58% of bachelor’s degree earners in the biological sciences and only 18% of degree earners in computer science and engineering [NCES, 2015]), but STEM fields are distinct from each other in many other ways, including curriculum, career paths, and the types of students they attract.

Mary CzerwinskiMary Czerwinski

Research Highlight: CRA Board Member Mary Czerwinski


My research revolves around tracking and understanding users’ emotional states and leveraging that information as additional context for the design of emotionally sentient systems. Some of the systems we have built have been designed for a user’s own personal reflection. Our first application, AffectAura, provided users with their own behavior patterns over time, such as what they were doing, where they were, who they were with and how they felt. This information could be used to make personal decisions about behavior change—if certain activities usually result in your feeling good or bad, perhaps you want to increase or decrease those behaviors.

Dan GrossmanDan Grossman

Research Highlight: CRA Board Member Dan Grossman


Since I started graduate school in 1997, I have considered myself a member of the programming languages research community — and I continue to attend and publish in the annual conferences of this vibrant computing subfield. But over the last 5-10 years, I have also found myself increasingly passionate about opportunities for computing researchers to focus on ways to influence computing education beyond, for those of us who are academics, our own classrooms and independent studies. Let me share some of the projects I have enjoyed (seriously!) and others I wish I had more time to pursue.