Tag Archive: CRA

Computing Research Association information.

Despite Austere Budget, Science Would See Increases in President’s Plan

By: Peter HarshaIn: /

In his last annual budget request before facing voters this November, President Obama showed his commitment to debt reduction by calling for cuts across almost all Federal agencies. But amidst the cuts, the President’s budget contains some key investments in research and development, including increased investments in computing research, that demonstrate his belief that Federally supported research can help spark the innovation required to keep the Nation placed at the top of an increasingly competitive world.

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CRA

CRA Hosts Tisdale Fellow

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Max Cho, a junior at Yale University studying cognitive science, spent eight weeks learning about science and technology policy in Washington through his work with the CRA Government Affairs staff and the Computing Community Consortium, and from the other Tisdale Fellows.

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Reinvigorating the Field

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A few weeks ago, members of the computing research community assembled for the 19th biennial Conference at Snowbird, the flagship conference for chairs of Ph.D.-granting departments of computing and allied fields and leaders from U.S. industrial and government computing research laboratories and centers. Here are some observations on trends in the field evident during the meeting.

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CRAMusings from the Chair

CRA-E White Paper Summary

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The overall goal of this White Paper is to provide guidance that will help institutions create an undergraduate environment that supports the acquisition and internalization of the computationally-oriented researcher mindset. We addressed overall directions rather than comprehensive details, not a curriculum design.

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CRA

Dangers of Rankings with Inaccurate Data

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Our culture is embedded with rankings: of movies, of college athletic teams, of consumer products, of universities, and of graduate programs. Rankings are a guilty pleasure—we claim they don’t influence us, and we know their foibles, yet we can’t help looking to see where we stand. Academics understand the problems behind reputational rankings such as the US News and World Report’s ranking of universities, of graduate and undergraduate programs, and of specialties within a field: they are largely subjective and influenced by non-scientific factors, they have long time-constants and are subject to hysteresis, and they at best reflect an overall assessment of a program without acknowledging exceptional elements. Yet we also know that rankings are used by prospective students, by university administrators allocating limited resources between units, and by sponsors.

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CRA

Breaking the Image

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For many institutions, early fall features Family Weekend events, when parents and families return to campus to visit their children and hear about research and educational activities occurring within the department. Especially for parents of first-year students, it is also an opportunity to hear about directions and opportunities in the field, as their children make decisions on a degree major.

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CRAMusings from the Chair

A Transition

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It’s been a great honor—not to mention a lot of fun—to serve on the Board of Directors of the Computing Research Association. My participation on the board has been truly fulfilling, in large part because the importance of CRA to the computing research community has grown markedly in recent years, and also because of the many great colleagues I’ve met along the way. Now, as the Board Chair, I have come to understand fully how much CRA has accomplished in recent years and how many great opportunities it has to make a difference for the community.

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CRA

Extraordinary Times, Extraordinary Challenges, Extraordinary Opportunities

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The Danish philosopher, Søren Kierkegaard,1 once remarked, “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” So it is with economic and social crises; they can be understood retrospectively, but must be experienced in the moment. Without doubt, these are extraordinary times, with global socioeconomic transformations most of us have heretofore experienced only via historical accounts and the stories of our elders.

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CRAMusings from the Chair

Publishing Quarks: Considering Our Culture

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Over the past thirty years, I have accumulated the common artifact of an academic research career—bookshelves overflowing with research journals and conference proceedings. Each time I pull an old and yellowing volume from my shelves, it is simultaneously nostalgic and thought-provoking to read a few randomly selected articles. Not only does this stroll down memory lane illuminate how far we have come, both technologically and theoretically; it also shows how profoundly the publication culture of our field has changed.

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CRAMusings from the Chair

Boldly Exploring the Endless Frontier

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During another time of great transition, near the end of World War II, President Roosevelt’s advisor, Vannevar Bush, wrote a seminal essay entitled “Science: The Endless Frontier” in which he sagely observed that “… without scientific progress no amount of achievement in other directions can insure our health, prosperity, and security as a nation in the modern world.” This essay was the progenitor of the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and its model of peer-reviewed fundamental, curiosity-driven research, a model now widely emulated around the world.

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