The following is a guest post from Heather Wright, Associate Director of the Center for Evaluating the Research Pipeline (CERP) at the Computing Research Association. The Computing Research Association (CRA) invites the academic computing community to complete a brief survey about the broadening participation in computing (BPC) plans required for proposals submitted to some programs of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Directorate. Specifically, we are interested in learning whether your academic department has created, or plans to create, a Departmental BPC Plan to assist faculty PIs submitting Medium and Large CISE Core Programs, Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace (SaTC), and Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) project proposals, […]

The following is a guest post from Karin Strauss from Microsoft Research and Luis Ceze from the University of Washington. The ability to automate computation has fueled the IT industry for a long time. Since the Babbage machine, our industry has been hard at work at making this process more and more efficient. But is that the only form in which computation can be useful? What about deploying computation in unfriendly environments or volumes where these machines won’t fit? Wouldn’t it be fantastic if computation can be deployed to a human body and, even more specifically, inside certain types of cells? For example, wouldn’t it be awesome to deploy computation […]

The National Academy of Sciences announced yesterday the election of 120 members and 26 international members in recognition of their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research. They will be inducted at the academy’s annual meeting next year. One of the newly elected members is Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council member Jennifer Rexford! Rexford is the Gordon Y.S. Wu Professor in Engineering in the Department of Computer Science at Princeton University. Membership in the academy is one of the highest honors given to a scientist in the United States. Congratulations, Jen!!

Contributions to this post were provided by Alexandra Chouldechova (Carnegie Mellon University), Sampath Kannan (University of Pennsylvania), and Aaron Roth (University of Pennsylvania).  The Computing Community Consortium held a workshop on Fair Representations and Fair Interactive Learning in 2018, which was led by Aaron Roth from University of Pennsylvania and Alexandra Chouldechova from Carnegie Mellon University. A group of 50 industry, academic, and government experts convened in Philadelphia to explore the roots of algorithmic bias. The workshop report has been highlighted on the front page of the May 2020 CACM Issue, which includes a snapshot of the report that interviewed both Roth and Chouldechova. We tend to believe that algorithmic […]

Passing along this opportunity from TechCongress, an organization focused on bringing technologists and researchers into the halls of Congress to help raise the tech IQ of policymakers and policymaking…  The COVID-19 pandemic has transformed Congress into a remote and virtual institution literally overnight. Capitol Hill was not prepared for this moment and is now confronting a number of urgent digital challenges. Help modernize the digital infrastructure of Congress! TechCongress has launched a Congressional Digital Service Fellowship to recruit a small collaborative tech team for an eight month fellowship to help Congress manage. Learn more from their blog here. This is limited term fellowship in order to: Meet the immediate need […]

The following is a letter to the community from Margaret Martonosi Assistant Director of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Directorate of Computer & Information Science & Engineering (CISE) and Anne Kinney Assistant Director of the NSF Directorate Mathematical and Physical Sciences (MPS). Dear Colleagues: The field of quantum computing has seen substantial progress in recent years, with the development of next-generation quantum processors in the 50- to 100-qubit range. Realizing the promise of such processors requires significant capacity-building to prepare the next generation of quantum discoverers. In light of the quantum-computing developments in the private sector as well as the opportunity for further innovation in the academic setting, the National Science Foundation and […]