Published: October 2022, Issue: Vol. 34/No.9, Download as PDF
Archive of articles published in the October 2022, Vol. 34/No.9 issue.
In the first installment of the CRA Update: Keeping you in the know column, we began synthesizing feedback received during the opening plenary (“CRA: Looking Forward”) of the 2022 CRA Conference at Snowbird. We finish summarizing the feedback received in this month’s column.
CRA is planning an Accessible Technology for All workshop co-hosted by CRA-Industry (CRA-I), Computing Community Consortium (CCC), and CRA-Widening Participation (CRA-WP) on February 22-23, 2023 in Washington, DC. This workshop is one of the activities CRA is currently pursuing under the umbrella of Socially Responsible Computing, one of the topics identified in the recent CRA Strategic Planning Effort.
The purpose of this workshop is to convene academic, industry, and government representatives to vision ways to make all technology accessible and why that is important and necessary for society as a whole. If you are interested in learning more about this workshop or other activities, please reach out to industryinfo@cra.org and let us know. This workshop will be in-person only with no hybrid option. Individual invitations will be sent out to community members before the end of the year.
The Computing Research Association-Industry committee is delighted to announce an upcoming virtual roundtable on Computing Research in Industry on Wednesday, November 9th from 3:00-4:30 PM ET.
The Biden Administration released a set of principles aimed at creating a Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights to, “help guide the design, development, and deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) and other automated systems so that they protect the rights of the American public.”
On September 13th, 25 computing researchers from across the country took part in a virtual training session to prepare them to make the case to Congress for federally funded computing research. Holding the training virtually is a change from past Congressional Visit Days that CRA Government Affairs staff have run. Due to ongoing restrictions stemming from the COVID-19 Pandemic and post-January 6th security, the Congressional office buildings located in Washington D.C. are not open to the general public. Despite these obstacles, CRA organized a virtual event for computing researchers to meet with their Congressional representatives in web meetings in order to keep making the case for Federal support for computing research.
The CRA-E Undergraduate Research Faculty Mentoring Award recognizes individual faculty members who have provided exceptional mentorship, undergraduate research experiences and, in parallel, guidance on admission and matriculation of these students to research-focused graduate programs in computing.
Nominations are due Friday, November 25, 2022, by 5 PM (ET). Winners will be notified by early February 2023. Click here to view the 2022 award winners and here to view the FAQs.
CRA would like to welcome two new members to its Board of Directors: Raquel Hill (Spelman College) and Eunice E. Santos (University of Illinois).
As a first step to address recruiting challenges in the computing research community, the Computing Research Association (CRA) launched the CV Database initiative in Fall 2018. This initiative provides a database of candidates for academic and industrial/government laboratory research positions, and it is searchable by most CRA member institutions.
The CV Database is accessed at https://cra.org/cv-database/. Recruiters are actively using the database, so please encourage all of your PhD students who are actively looking for academic or industrial/government laboratory research positions to post their applications. To obtain the highest benefit, we encourage students post their CV by November 1st (latest).
The National Science Foundation announced a series of grants as a part of their new Predictive Intelligence for Pandemic Prevention (PIPP) program. The quick onset, mass devastation, and unpredictability of new strands and waves of contagion with COVID-19 taught us just how unprepared we were to face a global pandemic. Nearly $26 million in new awards will be used to support “high-risk, high-payoff convergent research that aims to identify, model, predict, track and mitigate the effects of future pandemics.”
Ian Foster, former Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council Member and Professor at the University of Chicago and Division Director at Argonne National Laboratory, was recently named the 2022 Ken Kennedy award recipient. Presented by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Computer Society (IEEE-CS) the Ken Kennedy Award is an annual honor recognizing contributions to programmability and productivity in computing and community service or mentoring contributions.
Transformative advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and technology require large amounts of accurate, comprehensive data. There is a widening disparity between the types and amounts of datasets that organizations have access to. This not only hinders research, but widens the knowledge gap between entities. A commonly talked about solution is developing an open source knowledge structure that will be available to everyone and house a wide diversity of data to help address pressing issues such as economic growth, climate change, misinformation, pandemic prevention etc. Last week the National Science Foundation (NSF) released an “Open Knowledge Network Roadmap Report” as a guide towards realizing this type of infrastructure.
