The following is a guest blog post from Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council member Kathleen Fisher (Tufts University). Going to DARPA as a Program Manager (PM) is a great opportunity to make a difference by creating and managing a program much bigger in scope than what an individual faculty member can do at a university. Other PMs are talented and innovative thinkers who come from a broad range of backgrounds. Exposure to them and to the range of problems DARPA is reckoning with can be eye-opening. In the following paragraphs, I describe my experiences serving as a PM to convey a sense of what the job is like and why […]

Contributions to this post were provided by the Computing Research Association’s Senior Policy Analyst Brian Mosley. Yesterday, President Biden announced 30 of America’s most distinguished leaders in science and technology as members of his President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST). PCAST is the premier science advisory committee within the Executive Office of the President and is the sole body of advisors charged with making science, technology, and innovation policy recommendations to the President and the White House. Established by Executive Order, it is an independent Federal Advisory Committee composed of distinguished individuals from industry, academia, and non-profit organizations with a range of perspectives and scientific expertises.   The […]

The following blog was first posted on the CRA Bulletin.  After nearly 20 years at the helm of the Computing Research Association, Executive Director Andrew Bernat has retired from his position, marking the close of his incredible career that has spanned more than 40 years. Over the course of his career, he was founding member and chair of the Computer Science Department at the University of Texas at El Paso, a NSF Program Director and finally executive director of CRA since 2002. Under his leadership the association has seen a dramatic, positive transformation, more than tripling in size and launching significant new efforts in research visioning, widening participation, and postgraduate […]

The Climate Change AI (CCAI) organization, which is composed of volunteers from academia and industry who believe that tackling climate change requires concerted societal action in machine learning, has announced a new Call for Proposals: Climate Change AI Innovation Grants.  Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) can help support climate change mitigation and adaptation, as well as climate science, across many different areas, for example energy, agriculture, forestry, climate modeling, and disaster response (for a broader overview of the space, please refer to Climate Change AI’s interactive topic summaries and materials from previous events). However, impactful research and deployment have often been held back by a lack of data […]

John A. Stankovic, University of Virginia, will present “Towards Ambient Intelligence in Smart Healthcare,” part of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Computer & Information Science & Engineering (CISE) Distinguished Lecture Series on September 30th, 2021, from 11:00 AM to 12:15 PM ET. Professor John A. Stankovic is the BP America Professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of Virginia and Director of the Link Lab. He is a Fellow of both the IEEE and the ACM. He has been awarded an Honorary Doctorate from the University of York, U.K., for his work on real-time systems. He won the IEEE Real-Time Systems Technical Committee’s Award for Outstanding Technical Contributions and Leadership.  He also received […]

In July, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the National Science Foundation released a Request For Information (RFI) to gather public input on the National AI Research Resource (NAIRR) implementation plan. The deadline has been extended, to October 1st, to hopefully elicit more diverse responses. “Given that we want to hear from as many folks as possible — we’d really like a broad and diverse set of perspectives among the responses — we felt it best to extend the RFI response date by a month,” Erwin Gianchandani, who co-chairs the task force as NSF’s representative, told FedScoop in an article. “We believe that timeline will maximize responses while still allowing us to […]