Co-Chairs: Stephanie Forrest, University of New Mexico, Martha Pollack, University of Michigan, and Barbara Ryder, Virginia Tech

Speakers: Carla Brodley, Northeastern University, Hank Levy, University of Washington, and Donna Reese, Mississippi State University

This workshop will introduce new CS department chairs to some of the skills that they need to lead their organizations and to work with deans, provosts, and advisory boards—i.e., the stuff they never taught you in graduate school.

Welcome From the Conference Co-Chairs

Award Presentations

Distinguished Service, A. Nico Habermann, and Service to CRA Awards
Susan Davidson (University of Pennsylvania), and Andrew Bernat (CRA)

CRA-E Faculty Mentoring Awards
Ran Libeskind-Hadas, Harvey Mudd College, and Susanne Hambrusch, Purdue University

Machines of Loving Grace: Computers After the Smartphone

Chair: Ed Lazowska, University of Washington
Speaker: John Markoff, The New York Times, in conversation with Ed Lazowska

John Markoff has been a technology journalist, a student of technology, and a confidant of leading technology insiders for 40 years.

In addition to his reporting for the New York Times (and previously for The San Francisco Examiner, Byte Magazine, and Infoworld), Markoff is the author of a half-dozen books, including Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier (1991, with Katie Hafner), What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry (2005), and Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots (2015). The topic of the latter book—artificial intelligence and human values—is a particular current interest.

Markoff is at his best when conversing about topics that draw upon his broad and deep knowledge of technology and the personalities that shape it. Ed Lazowska will engage Markoff in such a conversation, with plenty of time for attendees to pose questions.

Chair: Ellen Zegura, Georgia Tech
Speaker: Andrew W. Moore, Carnegie Mellon University (formerly, Google Pittsburgh)

Disney Research is an international network of research labs, with the mission to push the scientific and technological forefront of innovation at The Walt Disney Company, with labs colocated with universities in Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, and Zurich. Google Pittsburgh has grown from two employees in 2006 to many hundreds of systems, algorithms and machine learning engineers working on the very heart of the company’s technology stack. Through stories of the growth of corporate lab culture in Pittsburgh over the past decade, I would like to discuss some perspectives on the big wins, the big pitfalls, and the lessons learned while dozens of global companies have commenced research and engineering organizations close to CMU’s School of Computer Science. I would like to end the talk with a full joint discussion of tips and tricks we can share amongst each other for optimizing these kinds of partnerships on behalf of the students, the faculty, the local economy and the companies.

(Note that a similar talk was due to have been given by Jessica Hodgins, Professor at CMU Robotics Institute and VP at Disney. With great regret, she has suddenly needed to withdraw due to a family emergency. I’m no Jessica, and the slides will be a little hasty, but I’m hoping for a spirited session with useful takeaways for all of us).

The brief plenary will be followed by breakouts into parallel tracks.
Session Leader: Tracy Camp, Colorado School of Mines

“Booming enrollments” is on the minds of many CS faculty. In this session, the panelists will share details on what has been learned recently via two CRA surveys (one to departments, one to students), present the status of a National Academies committee on the growth of computer science undergraduate enrollments, and introduce the parallel breakout sessions.

Programs for High-Achieving Students (Ballroom 1)

Chair: Nancy Amato, Texas A&M University

Speakers: Marie desJardins, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, Maggie Johnson, Google, Bruce Porter, University of Texas at Austin, and Jennifer Rexford, Princeton

During growing enrollments, CS departments need to find ways to provide enriching and challenging experiences for top students. Honors programs, undergraduate research, specialized leadership experiences, and five-year B.S. and M.S. programs can engage such students and give them high-quality experiences that make them competitive for future graduate school and fellowships.

Student Profiles and Motivations During the Enrollment Growth (Ballroom 2)

Chairs: Tracy Camp, Colorado School of Mines, and Mary Hall, University of Utah

Speakers: Lecia Barker, University of Texas at Austin, Tracy Camp, Colorado School of Mines, Jeff Forbes, Duke University, Mary Hall, University of Utah, and Rob Rutenbar, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

This panel will address a number of questions, including:

• Who are the students in our growing CS programs?
• What are their motivations for taking computing courses?
• How are changes to computing degree programs affecting the profiles of students in our courses?
• How are best practices in increasing diversity being adapted during this period of enrollment growth?

Impact of Enrollment Increases on Department Practices (Ballroom 3)
Chairs: Susanne Hambrusch, Purdue University, and Stu Zweben, The Ohio State University
Speakers: David Culler, UC Berkeley, Zvi Galil, Georgia Tech, Robert Lewis, College of William & Mary, Ian Mitchell, University of British Columbia, and Vivek Sarkar, Rice University

This panel will address a number of questions including:

• How are CS departments managing the current increases in CS enrollments?
• What actions are departments taking to meet their demand?
• What activities are they forgoing or reducing to compensate for the resources needed to meet the growing demand?
• What are the likely long-term consequences of these practices?

Smart Cities (Ballroom 1)
Chair: Farnam Jahanian, Carnegie Mellon University
Speakers: Stuart Cowan, Smart Cities Council, Erwin Gianchandani, National Science Foundation, Susan Graham, UC Berkeley, and Michael Mattmiller, City of Seattle

Today, communities across the nation face a set of deeply interlocking physical, social, economic, and infrastructural challenges. By collaborating at the intersection of computing, engineering, and public policy, private and public-sector stakeholders are finding innovative solutions to the evolving needs of our cities—from enhanced delivery of city services to increased resiliency and efficiency of urban infrastructure and more sustainable environments. This digitization of the urban environment holds the potential to unlock transformational progress in key areas, including health and wellness, energy efficiency, building automation, transportation, and public safety. This session will discuss the potential to bring interdisciplinary university researchers together with civic leaders and an engaged citizenry to build the smart and connected communities of the future—with a focus on the catalytic role of computing, information science, and engineering.

Extracurricular Temptations–Hackathons, Innovation Contests, Etc. (Ballroom 2)
Chair: Ellen Zegura, Georgia Tech
Speakers: David Liben-Nowell, Carleton College, Steven Miller, Singapore Management University, and Margo Seltzer, Harvard University

This session will explore the growth and impact of activities for computing students that operate outside the usual classes and degree programs. These extracurricular temptations include hackathons and competitions where students may invest intense effort over short periods of time for rewards that may include fame and fortune. The panelists will discuss how universities can and should support these activities for the benefit of students and overall educational goals.

Why CS Departments Should Embrace CS Education Research (Ballroom 3)
Chair and Moderator: Ran Libeskind-Hadas, Harvey Mudd College
Speakers: Diana Franklin, University of Chicago, Mark Guzdial, Georgia Tech, Scott Klemmer, UC San Diego, Andy Ko, University of Washington, and Ben Shapiro, University of Colorado-Boulder

Computing education research (CER) is an area of growing interest as participation in computing draws a larger and broader audience to our field.  CER has a number of high quality venues for disseminating research; the NSF is now awarding both CAREER and Graduate Research Fellowship awards in this field; and departments are increasingly hiring CER faculty into tenure-track lines.  This panel will address a number of questions including:

• What are some of the major research questions in CER?
• What computer science research is driving CER and how can CER advance computer science research?
• What are the benefits to a CS Department for having CER research programs?
• How can CER advance teaching, diversity, and assessment?

After Dinner Talks – Computing Research Futures
Chair: Beth Mynatt, Georgia Tech

Computing research continues to be at the forefront of innovation, impacting society in ways never before imagined. In this session, speakers will discuss these new impacts and what the future might hold.

Theory for Society
Speaker: Cynthia Dwork, Microsoft Research

As technology reaches increasingly deeper into our everyday lives, changing the fabric of society woven by our interactions with fellow citizens, government, and the corporate world, design decisions have an increasing impact on basic social values such as privacy, fairness, and protection from physical and emotional harm. Complexity of this type requires mathematically rigorous notions that allow us to quantify these goods and their loss, explore fundamental tradeoffs and limitations, and lay the theoretical groundwork for what can be achieved. This talk will describe relevant efforts in privacy-preserving data analysis and fairness in classification, and discuss an agenda for future directions.

Computing Alone Doesn’t Solve Social Problems. So, What Next?
Speaker: Kentaro Toyama, University of Michigan

In spite of the do-gooder rhetoric of Silicon Valley, it’s no secret that computing technology in and of itself cannot solve systemic social problems. Even after a golden age of digital innovation, poverty persists, economic inequality is rising, and politics is more polarized than ever. Given this, what should computer scientists do if they want to genuinely contribute to a better world? This talk offers suggestions for computing researchers and educators.

Organized discussions based on the following articles and books:

Articles:
American Statistical Association Statement on the “Role of Statistics in Data Science” (pdf available here)

“Rescuing US Biomedical Research From its Systemic Flaws,” in Proceedings of the National Academies (pdf available here)

Books:
Designing the New American University by Michael Crow and William Dabars (available for purchase here)

An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization by Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey (available for purchase here)

Stuck in the Shallow End: Education, Race, and Computing by Jane Margolis (available for purchase here)

Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots by John Markoff (available for purchase here)

Whistling Vivaldi: How Stereotypes Affect Us and What We Can Do (Issues of Our Time) by Claude M. Steele  (available for purchase here)

Data Science in the 21^st Century (Superior A)
Chair: Barbara Ryder, Virginia Tech
Co-Chairs: Lise Getoor, UC Santa Cruz, and Steve Heller, Two Sigma
Speakers: David Culler, UC Berkeley, Rayid Ghani, University of Chicago, Rahel Jhirad, Hearst, and Rob Rutenbar, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Lately, the interdisciplinary area of data science has recently received an enormous amount of attention. The use of analytics to extract information from small or large amounts of heterogeneous data, in order to inform decision-making, is a hot topic in a broad set of areas such as policy, science, and business.

This panel, comprised of practitioners and academics, will explore the educational and research aspects and the implications of the following questions:

• What is data science and what is its relation to computer science?
• What do students have to learn about data science to become practitioners? Should learning data science require technical skills and, if so, what is the minimum skill set?
• What are the big research questions in data science?

Our goal is to stimulate discussion on these topics. Visit this url for more info: bit.ly/cradsp

Department Rankers and Rankings: Truths and Consequences (Ballroom)
Session Organizers: H.V. Jagadish, University of Michigan, and Fred Schneider, Cornell University
Moderator: H.V. Jagadish, University of Michigan
Speakers: Steve Furber, University of Manchester, Robert Morse, US News & World Report, and Fred Schneider, Cornell University

Many members of our community currently feel the need for an authoritative ranking of CS departments in North America. Should CRA or another organization be involved in creating a ranking? To inform such discussions, the speakers will explain what is involved in creating an authoritative ranking. We will hear about the U.K. ranking, which dictates resource allocation to CS departments in the U.K., and about the U.S. News & World Report ranking, which became popular after the National Research Council’s exit from the field. We will also survey some of the issues connected with creating or not creating an authoritative ranking.

Synthetic vs. Natural: Hybrids Between Technology and Biology (Wasatch A)
Chairs: Mary Czerwinski, Microsoft Research, and Helene Steiner, Microsoft Research
Speakers: Luis Ceze, University of Washington, Jim Haseloff, University of Cambridge, Lining Yao, MIT, and Josiah Zayner, ODIN and NASA Ames Research Center

New technologies have brought biology into the spotlight and opened up novel opportunities to program, design, engineer, and communicate with biological components. Programming and engineering give computer scientists the ability to not only understand the complexity of these biological components but to also take advantage of them in order to create new functions, applications, and novel interfaces, all of which are enabled by technology but driven by nature.

In this panel, the speakers will explore the new opportunities enabled by combining engineering, computer science, and biology, and will present research examples using programmable materials, data storage in DNA, obfuscation and encryption in vivo, and tools for biological circuits. The speakers hope to encourage discussion and inspiration around these biologically inspired research projects.

Schools and Colleges of Computing (Superior A)
Chair and Moderator: Chris Johnson, University of Utah
Speakers: Randy Bryant, Carnegie Mellon University, Rajesh Gupta, University of California, San Diego, Richard LeBlanc, Georgia Tech and Seattle University, John Paxton, Montana State University, and Bobby Schnabel, ACM and Indiana University

As computing continues to grow by tremendous leaps and bounds and permeate throughout the university’s intellectual landscape, many department chairs are finding their programs have outgrown, or are outgrowing, the confines of their current locations in colleges of engineering or science. Discussions are taking place in many departments about exploring the possibility of expanding to a school or college of computing (or a similar related name). This panel will explore the multifold administrative, social, strategic, and economic challenges confronting departments that want to become schools or colleges of computing. Following short presentations by the panel members of their insights, the panel will discuss the challenges of, and the strategies for, transforming a department into a school or college of computing.

Whistling Past the Graveyard: Why the End of Moore’s Law Matters to All of CS (Wasatch B)
Chairs: Tom Conte, Georgia Tech, and Margaret Martonosi, Princeton University
Speakers: David Brooks, Harvard University, Paolo Gargini, IEEE International Roadmap of Devices and Systems, Mark Hill, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Krysta Svore, Microsoft Research

For five decades, Moore’s law has allowed the computer industry to achieve increasingly capable and high-performance hardware and software with each new semiconductor generation. These scaling trends have underpinned most of the revolutionary computing breakthroughs of the past 50 years. Now, however, scaling trends are slowing due to both physical limits in fabricating ever-smaller transistors and to power dissipation limits in using them. Increasingly, computing hardware researchers and manufacturers are planning for the post-Moore’s law era. There is no silver bullet; the solution will require fundamental changes at all levels of the computing stack. In this panel, the speakers will lead a discussion about why all of computer science will be affected by these changes and how departments should be planning for, and reacting to, this development.

Chair: Fred Schneider, Cornell University
Speaker: Peter Harsha, CRA
Panelists: Kent Foster, Microsoft Research, Greg Hager, Johns Hopkins University, and Martha Pollack, University of Michigan

Uncertainty with the political process is always a problem for those concerned with federal investments in research, but 2016 promises to be even more uncertain than usual. Highly contentious presidential campaigns, heated congressional races, a deeply polarized Congress, exceptional scrutiny of federal investments in research, and who-knows-what-else that will emerge in the months ahead will likely impact the level of federal spending on science.

To start the discussion, CRA’s Peter Harsha will attempt to make sense of this seemingly chaotic political landscape and discuss how and why CRA and CRA’s partners in the science advocacy community are navigating the terrain to support the computing research community’s interests. Next, a panel will discuss research-funding realities given the imminent increases in faculty size, where and whether additional funding might be found, and promotion and tenure criteria if research funding becomes scarce.

Organizer: Jan Cuny, National Science Foundation
Speakers: Mark Guzdial, Georgia Tech, Jeff Forbes, Duke University, Kimberly Hughes, University of Texas at Austin, and Lori Pollock, University of Delaware

This session will begin with a reception, which will be followed by a panel discussion. The national Computer Science for All initiative aims to make great CS available to students in every K-12 school. It’s an audacious goal as any one who’s worked in a school can tell you. Yet, Computer Science for All has gained tremendous momentum, with participation from federal agencies, states, school districts, and private organizations, including ACM, Code.org, the Computer Science Teacher’s Association, NCWIT, and Teach for America.

This session will provide the opportunity to talk with faculty from leading CS departments about how they are supporting Computer Science for All. The speakers will discuss their experiences launching the new AP CS Principles course, supporting research on CS education, providing professional development for local teachers, working across districts and states to create CS pathways, broadening participation across the pipeline, and involving undergraduates in K-12 with service-learning projects.