Archive of articles published in the 2020 issue.
CRA-WP is honored to present the recipients of two award programs. Tawanna Dillahunt of the University of Michigan and Michel A. Kinsy of Boston University have been selected as the 2020 Skip Ellis Early Career Award recipients. Olga Russakovsky of Princeton University has been selected as the 2020 Anita Borg Early Career Award recipient.
Automated, proximity-based contact tracing apps use Bluetooth to identify who is near them. In theory, this is a great solution that can be efficiently deployed widely (albeit with many privacy and protocol considerations addressed here), however the assumption is that people have access to mobile phones with Bluetooth and use technology similarly.
To the computing community,
With this particularly challenging academic year coming to an end, and the upcoming NSF CISE program submissions, it is a good time to update everyone on the NSF CISE Pilot Program for Broadening Participation in Computing (BPC) Plans. All Medium and Large CISE Core Programs, Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace (SaTC), and Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) project proposals require an approved BPC Plan by the time of award. CRA and NCWIT have led an effort to develop the BPCnet.org portal as a resource for the community to assist in developing Departmental BPC Plans and Individual BPC Plans.
New Resources on BPCnet.org:
The community has been developing additional resources on BPCnet.org to simplify the process of writing a BPC Plan (for both Individual and Departmental plans). There is an FAQ link, plan templates, sample BPC Plans, and an extensive Getting Started Guide. There will also be additional virtual workshops later in the summer, and in-person workshops once travel is resumed.
How You Can Help:
The inclusion of BPC plans in a large number of CISE projects is a significant step in making our field inclusive and welcoming, and consequently growing the computing workforce and making it more representative of the users of technology. It will take a community-wide effort, and significant preparation of the community to make this BPC effort successful. To this end, we would like to invite interested people from this group to provide feedback on the contents in the portal. If you are interested in reviewing the portal contents, please complete our interest form.
Thank you for your interest in the NSF BPC Pilot Program, which has contributed to creating a large resource that we expect the community will find valuable. Please let us know if we can answer any questions by contacting bpcmailinglist@cra.org.
Sincerely,
BPCnet.org Steering Committee
We are pleased to announce the Workshop Series on Writing Departmental Broadening Participation in Computing (BPC) Plans.
As part of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering’s (CISE) commitment to broaden participation in computing (BPC), a number of NSF Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) programs now require PIs to have a meaningful broadening participation in computing (BPC) plan at time of award. Computing departments are encouraged to develop departmental BPC plans that faculty can use in their proposals submitted to these NSF programs.
To support departments developing a Departmental BPC Plan, the Computing Research Association (CRA) will host a series of workshops funded by NSF. The first two workshops in this series will be held virtually on July 13-14, 2020 and August 6-7, 2020.
These two workshops will present the same content on BPC plans, and include hands-on activities and real-time feedback for writing these plans. At the end of the workshop, the participants will have their own draft Departmental BPC Plan. Following the workshops, the participants will also have the opportunity to receive additional feedback as they continue to refine their BPC plans.
Please visit the workshop website for more information. The deadline to apply for the July workshop is July 8th, 2020. Click here to apply for the July workshop.
We also encourage you to visit BPCnet.org to access resources on broadening participation in computing and NSF BPC plans.
Sincerely,
BPC Plan Workshop Steering Committee
CRA and CCC are pleased to announce a new Computing Innovation Fellows (CIFellows) Program for 2020. This program recognizes the significant disruption to the academic job search caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and associated economic uncertainty and aims to provide a career-enhancing bridge experience for recent and soon-to-be PhD graduates in computing.
The goal of the program is to create career growth opportunities that support maintaining the computing research pipeline. This effort takes inspiration from CRA/CCC’s NSF-funded Computing Innovation Fellows Programs with cohorts starting 2009, 2010, and 2011. The program will offer 2 year postdoctoral opportunities in computing, with cohort activities to support career development and community building for this group of Fellows.
We will be hosting a one-hour CIFellow 2020 Informational Webinar on Tuesday, May 26th at 3:00PM ET. Please register for the webinar here.
This article and the accompanying figures and tables present the results from the 49th annual CRA Taulbee Survey, which documents 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, computer engineering, or information.
We thank all of the respondents to this year’s questionnaire. CRA member respondents will again be given the opportunity to obtain certain survey information for a self-selected peer group. Instructions for doing this will be emailed to all such departments.
After careful consideration of the current and projected situation surrounding the pandemic, CRA’s 2020 Conference at Snowbird planning committee has unfortunately decided to cancel the in-person conference scheduled to take place at Snowbird, Utah, July 21-23, 2020.
We trust you find this decision as disappointing as we do. For nearly 50 years, we have had the honor of bringing the leadership of the computing research community together every other year at Snowbird for the benefit of the community. But given the uncertainty surrounding travel and large gatherings this summer, and the need to come to a decision in sufficient time to allow our participants to make plans, we cannot commit to holding the in-person portion of the conference this year.
In place of the in-person event, we are currently exploring options to provide a virtual conference during the dates of July 21-23. The virtual conference agenda will be specialized to include content we feel is necessary for the community to hear and engage with, useful in understanding and operating in the current environment, or of sufficient general interest to merit inclusion. We are now moving forward with plans to hold a full in-person Conference at Snowbird in late July/early August 2021 and will resume our regular conference pattern of every other year with a conference in 2022 and subsequent even number years. Future dates are subject to change.
We’ll share additional details on our plans in the coming weeks. In the meantime, thanks for your patience and understanding during this unprecedented time.
If you have any questions about the conference, please direct them to snowbird@cra.org.
It should come as no surprise that the normal operations of official Washington have been heavily disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Current events have derailed almost every aspect of the usual budget process. In terms of emergency funding, the CARES Act, passed at the end of March, has about $180 million dollars in emergency research funding for NIH, NSF, DOE Office of Science, and NIST. As well, there was about another $86 million for three agencies (NASA, NOAA, and NIST) to support “continuity of operations;” i.e., any operations that were disrupted by the pandemic, such as rescheduling a space science mission at NASA. Additionally, there was support for higher education, in the form of about $14 billion; however, that isn’t set aside for research and by all reports is being used by colleges and universities for administrative purposes (meaning, keeping the lights on). All that funding was directly related to responding to the pandemic.
CRA invites the academic computing community to complete a brief survey about the broadening participation in computing (BPC) plans required for proposals submitted to some programs of the NSF CISE Directorate. Specifically, we are interested in learning whether your academic department has created, or plans to create, a Departmental BPC Plan to assist faculty PIs submitting Medium and Large CISE Core Programs, Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace, and Cyber-Physical Systems project proposals, which all require an approved BPC plan by the time of award.
The deadline for completion is 9:00 AM ET, June 5, 2020.
Data Buddies 2019 came to a close at the beginning of February 2020, concluding the seventh year of data collection. Since its launch in 2013, the survey collected approximately 75,000 total responses, and 32,000 of these respondents are part of CERP’s longitudinal cohorts.
Since 2018, the CRA Education Committee’s “Undergraduate Research Highlights” series has been showcasing outstanding research done by undergraduate students at universities and colleges across North America. It is one of a number of CRA-E’s activities that foster and recognize talented computing researchers with the goal of increasing the research pipeline, promoting graduate education, and advocating research-based careers.
The latest article in the series, “From COMP105 to Programming Languages Research in Haskell,” highlights the work of Tufts University graduate Marilyn Sun, who collaborated with her research advisor Kathleen Fisher, a CRA board member.
