The mission of Computing Research Association’s (CRA) Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is to catalyze the computing research community and enable the pursuit of innovative, high-impact research. CCC conducts activities that strengthen the research community, articulate compelling research visions, and align those visions with pressing national and global challenges. CCC communicates the importance of those visions to policymakers, government and industry stakeholders, the public, and the research community itself.
In accordance with the mission, CCC is issuing a new call for proposals for workshops that will catalyze and enable innovative research at the frontiers of computing.
From the solicitation:
Successful activities will articulate new research visions, galvanize community interest in those visions, mobilize support for those visions from the computing research community, government leaders, and funding agencies, and encourage broader segments of society to participate in computing research and education.
Workshop organizers are expected to bring together a group of scientists and practitioners in the area of interest, and to formulate a program that encourages new ideas, innovative thinking, and broad discussion. Workshops can be of varying sizes, typically ranging from 20 to 100 participants. It is important that the participants cover a broad spectrum to ensure full coverage of the area, both in terms of content area representation and employment (academia, industry, research labs, and policy and funding organizations).
Workshops are expected to have a tangible output – for example, a whitepaper (or set thereof) or a workshop report. Workshop outcomes should be targeted to multiple audiences (the research community, science policy groups or funding agencies, the general public), and the deliverables should be tailored for easy dissemination. CCC will help to support both workshop organization and the subsequent generation and communication of the output.
The CCC encourages creative ideas from all segments of the computing research community on topics ranging from the formulation of new basic research areas and technologies to the use of new or existing research ideas and technologies to address important scientific or societal challenges.
Examples of past visioning activities funded by the CCC cover a broad range of computer and information science and engineering topics, such as Online Education, Health IT, Spatial Computing, and Disaster Management (see the full set of funded activities here).
Many of these past visioning activities have had a significant impact on the national research agenda. CCC held two visioning activities in Health IT, one in 2009 and another in 2012. The 2009 workshop resulted in a white paper titled Information Technology Research Challenges for Healthcare: From Discovery to Delivery, which was cited in the National Science Foundation (NSF) solicitation for Smart Health and Wellbeing. The 2012 workshop resulted in a workshop report, titled Computing and Healthcare: New Opportunities and Directions. In 2013, NSF updated their program to a new joint program with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) called Smart and Connected Health. This new solicitation also references the CCC and the work done through both Visioning Workshops.
If you have ideas or topics topic for visioning, please consider submitting a proposal by the December 1 deadline. Proposals should be no more than six pages in length. They should describe the existing or potential vision(s) and proposed activities in detail, including how the larger community will be engaged.
For more information, see the complete call for proposals. And if you have questions, please e-mail us or plan to tune into our webinar on October 2 at 1pm ET. Please register for the webinar here by 12:00am September 30.
We look forward to receiving your ideas!
