Tag Archive: CRA
Computing Research Association information.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The hearing room for the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science and Technology is as formal and imposing as the name suggests. Each time I have testified there on aspects of the Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) program, I have paused to reflect on the two quotations inscribed there. The quotations command attention because they are inscribed on the paneled wall behind the seats of the committee members—and all witnesses face the committee and that wall.
The CRA Board of Directors has recently had discussions about problems in faculty hiring practices, especially related to the timing of the process and the associated gridlock that results as candidates wait for responses to their job applications.
That awful gurgling noise you hear in the background is the global economy draining through the hole that is the U.S. subprime mortgage crisis. We do not yet know how bad the economic downturn will be. However, if history is a guide, we can expect the weakened economy to depress rates of return on university endowments, tighten state budgets due to decreased tax revenues, constrain corporate R&D spending, and increase the already large pressure on federal government discretionary spending. In short, we are likely to experience constraints on faculty and researcher hiring and on overall education and research funding.
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