The CIFellows 2021 application site is now open. Applicants may start their applications here. Please read the CIFellows 2021 website and FAQs in its entirety before submitting. Applicants must submit the following for registration by midnight May 10th 2021 AoE (Anywhere on Earth): Title – title of proposed research project. If you are applying twice with the same project, please use the same title but follow it with A on the first application and B on the second. Application information – items will include diversity information; the PhD (university, advisor, date of defense); current professional information (university, current position, advisor); and CIFellowship information (Mentor name and email address, host institution, […]

Ibrahim Sabek began his CIFellowship in September 2020 after receiving his PhD from the University of Minnesota in January 2020. Sabek is at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) working with Michael Cafarella, Principal Research Scientist, and Tim Kraska, Associate Professor, at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Current Project My current project is exploiting machine learning models (ML) to optimize the performance of data-intensive systems, with special focus on data access and query execution modules. This includes introducing ML-optimized core data structures, such as indexes and bloom filters, and boosting the performance of main in-memory operations, such as joins and query scheduling, using statistical and deep learning techniques. […]

Cyn Liu began her CIFellowship in January 2021 after receiving her PhD from Indiana University, Bloomington in Fall of 2020. Liu is at the University of California, Irvine (UCI) working with Paul Dourish, Chancellor’s Professor of Informatics at UCI and Director of the Steckler Center for Responsible, Ethical and Accessible Technology. Current Project Responding to climate change, environmental crisis, and the global pandemic, my current research focuses on exploring, creating, deploying, and evaluating (multi-)sensory data representation models that leverage our bodily senses to raise environmental awareness, increase data literacy, and support community health initiatives. Over the past decade, the emergence of low-cost sensors, proliferation of personal devices, and expansion of wireless […]

Sunipa Dev began her CIFellowship in January 2021 after  receiving her PhD from University of Utah in Fall of 2020. Dev is at the University of California, Los Angeles  (UCLA) working with Kai-Wei Chang, Assistant Professor of Computer Science at UCLA. Dev recently co-presented a tutorial at AAAI 2021 which highlights using an interactive, visual tool, how language representations carry social biases and the ways in which we can mitigate the same. Details can be found here. She is also organizing a workshop on Responsible AI at KDD 2021. Current Project Language representations are ubiquitously used in language processing and generation tasks, which in turn are key in a variety of […]

The Computing Research Association (CRA) and Computing Community Consortium (CCC) are pleased to announce a new Computing Innovation Fellows (CIFellows) cohort for 2021. This program recognizes the continued disruption to hiring in academic institutions due to the COVID-19 pandemic. As before, this program aims to provide a career-enhancing bridge experience for recent and soon-to-be PhD graduates in computing to support maintaining the computing research pipeline.  The Computing Innovation Fellows Program is open to researchers whose work falls under the umbrella of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Computing and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Directorate. This includes PhD graduates who are planning a career in academia either as a research scientist or […]

Richard Canevez began his CIFellowship in January 2021 after receiving his PhD from Pennsylvania State University this past October. Canevez is currently at the University of Hawaii at Manoa under the mentorship of Professor and Communication Information Science Graduate Chair, Jenifer Sunrise Winter. Current Project: Advocate’s Toolbox As an American, none of us need to look very far to see evidence of the deeply set injustices in our system: racism, sexism, and economic oppression permeate our collective existence. We have seen in the past year the need for activism and protest to fulfill the potential of this nation, by speaking truth to power. We have also more recently seen the danger […]