CRA Industry Committee

Our mission: CRA-Industry convenes industry partners on computing research topics of mutual interest and connects our partners with CRA’s academic and government constituents for mutual benefit and improved societal outcomes.

The CRA-Industry standing committee was created in the Fall of 2020 with the goal of reaching out to industry partners involved in computing research and giving them new opportunities to convene and connect on topics of mutual interest. As a part of the CRA, CRA-Industry also facilitates the interaction between industry partners and other organizations deeply involved in computing research, including academic institutions and government agencies.

The CRA-Industry committee recognizes the diversity of companies that participate in the computing research ecosystem and seeks to enable those companies, big and small, to get the greatest benefit from sharing their experiences with each other. Furthermore, CRA-Industry recognizes that many companies not traditionally contributing or benefitting from computing research are now actively engaging with the computing research community. We seek to help such companies engage, contribute, and participate in the computing research community for the benefit of all.

While CRA-Industry is a new committee, we envision activities including hosting virtual round tables, in-person workshops, seeding industry partnerships in collaborations across academia and government, and authoring white papers on topics of interest to our partners. We also coordinate closely with other CRA committees, such as CRA-WP and the CCC, which have a long history of engaging with industry partners on matters of shared interest.

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Resources

CCC Report on the landscape of industry-academic interaction (2015-16)

CCC white paper and CRA Board slides that focuses on the specific increases in faculty interaction that prompted CRA forming the Industry Working Group (June/July 2019)

Blog Post
Paper: Evolving Academia/Industry Relations in Computing Research
Slides

CRA Industry Working Group white paper reporting survey results from CS departments about industry interaction (August 2020)

Blog Post
Slides
Paper: CRA Industry/Academia Committee Report

CRA Industry Committee Report to CRA Board (February 2021)

Slides

Initiatives

The CRA-Industry Committee is planning to start a series of 75-minute virtual roundtable meetings in July 2021 focused on issues of interest to our computing research industry partners. We will use these meetings to seed additional CRA-Industry activities, publicize the CRA-Industry committee, and attract potential companies to participate. The topics for the first three Round Table meetings are below. Sign up here for more information.

Virtual Roundtable on Corporate Responsibility and Computing Research
July 14, 2021
4:00 PM – 5:30 PM Eastern Time
Event Details

Today, more companies are deliberately extending their social responsibility initiatives at the behest of investors, customers, and employees. How should industry be viewing and factoring societal equity into its research agendas? This virtual roundtable will explore the concept, principles, and best practices of socially responsible computing research. Ideally, participants will gain a sense of considerations that might apply to their strategic research planning by developing a broad framework for the concept of research equity that goes beyond recent examples in machine learning.

Virtual Roundtable on Best Practices on using the Cloud for Computing Research
September 15, 2021
3:00 PM – 4:15 PM Eastern Time
Event Details

Intended audience: Computing researchers in academia and industry, cloud providers, research sponsors.

A major focus in computing research across industry, academia, and government is to advance the frontiers of computing by experimenting with leading-edge compute platforms. This was initially at odds with early instances of cloud/warehouse computing that focused on deploying commodity rather than state-of-the-art systems. However, cloud computing platforms have advanced significantly during the last two decades to the point where there are now many notable examples of their use in research. Further, the cloud’s “pay as you go” model has proved attractive for research related to machine learning and data analytics that benefit from elastic provisioning of resources. It is noteworthy that NSF has extended its CloudBank portal with a CloudBank Catalog with links to commercial cloud services that can be paid from NSF grants. Hence, increased use of the cloud for computing research could offer new revenue opportunities to cloud providers, in addition to joint research across industry and academia. There will also likely be a crossover from the use of cloud computing for research to its use in teaching, thereby making future generations of computing professionals more accustomed to cloud platforms.

The purpose of this virtual roundtable is to discuss best practices on using the cloud for computing research and the resulting synergistic opportunities across industry, academia, and government. Some of the discussion topics will include:

Use of cloud computing to broaden the set of institutions that can gain access to large-scale resources for computing research
Fostering research collaborations across industry, academia, and government (also enabled by data sharing and open-source software)
Preparing students to be consumers of cloud computing in their future careers
Enabling computing researchers to be creators and early adopters of leading-edge cloud technologies, while looking under the hood and customizing the systems being used
Demystifying and capping costs incurred when using the cloud for research.

Virtual Roundtable on Research and Decision Horizons in the Semiconductor Technology Ecosystem

Summary: The purpose of this virtual roundtable is to identify principles and opportunities for cross-stack research collaboration in computing, with particular attention to synergies between process technology, design, systems, and applications. Analogous to the national academies “tire track” diagram, which shows the interplay between academic research, industry, and government with several “long distance” paths between disciplines, we hope to come to a better understanding of how to identify and foster opportunities for “long distance” leaps between layers of the computing stack. The virtual roundtable will review the history of NVRAM as a motivating example, and consider industry decision timeframes as a key issue in identifying and realizing research collaboration opportunities.