Su-In Lee, University of Washington, explains her poster to a symposium participant.

The following is a guest blog post by Liz Bradley from the University of Colorado and a member of the CCC Executive Committee.

Last week we summarized the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) May 2016 Symposium, Computing Research: Addressing National Priorities and Societal Needs. This is the second of a series of blogs that will be posted about the symposium and the four different themes that were presented.

One of the most dynamic and forward-looking events at the symposium was a poster session involving 38 early career faculty members, postdoctoral scholars, and graduate students. The interests of this group, which represents the future of the field, spanned the full range of computing research. A number of their posters described novel technologies for computer-human interaction (language, gaze, safety issues, health monitoring, etc.). The problems and opportunities of data also catalyzed a number of presentations in this session: regarding provenance, privacy, security, reliability, visualization, and the extraction of knowledge from data (e.g., substance abuse, cyberbullying, and medical diagnosis). A number of poster presenters also addressed the pressing problems of sustainability and health, mirroring the main threads of the overall symposium. Rounding out the presentations were interesting ideas regarding how computing can support creativity in general and education in particular.

Presentations and informal interactions at the symposium were eye-opening to these early career scientists, not only making them aware of problems and perspectives from other fields of computing research, but also of the need to consider the societal impact of their own research, and the importance of open interchange between technical leaders and policymakers.

A full list of the presenters and the titles of their presentations can be found here; short videos of the poster presentations can be found here.