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 […]

Melanie Mitchell, Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council member and Professor at the Santa Fe Institute and Portland State University, was recently on the Munk Debates podcast, in an episode titled “The Rise of Thinking Machines” with Stuart Russell, Professor of Computer Science at the University of California at Berkeley. The podcast, led by Munk Debate chair and moderator Rudyard Griffiths, explores whether the quest for true AI is one of the great existential risks of our time.  Russell believes that if we keep on our current path, AI has the potential to cause real harm. He said, “We need to build a new foundation for AI, but we don’t know […]

Last week the Computing Research Association (CRA) and Computing Community Consortium (CCC) announced the Computing Innovation Fellows (CIFellows) Program for 2021. This program recognizes the significant disruption to the academic job search caused by the pandemic and associated economic uncertainty and aims to help ensure continuity of the research pipeline through disruptions related to COVID-19.  Awards will support an individual for 2 years as a postdoctoral fellow (“CIFellow”) at a host institution of their choosing. CRA will issue subawards to the Host Institution to cover an annual postdoc salary of $75,000, plus fringe and indirect costs (capped at 35%). CIFellows will have the ability to select a Fall 2021 or […]

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 […]

In October 2020, the Computing Research Association (CRA) and the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) released more than a dozen white papers exploring areas and issues around computing research with the potential to address national priorities over the next four years. Called “Quadrennial Papers,” the white papers attempt to portray a broad picture of computing research detailing potential research directions, challenges, and recommendations for policymakers and the computing research community. As a continuation of our 2020 series, we are delighted to release two more papers titled: “Taking Stock of the Present and Future of Smart Technologies for Older Adults and Caregivers” and “Imagine All the People: Citizen Science, Artificial Intelligence, and […]

Contributions to this post were provided by Elizabeth Bradley (University of Colorado Boulder), Madhav Marathe (University of Virginia), Melanie Moses (The University of New Mexico), William D Gropp (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign), and Daniel Lopresti (Lehigh University).  In Fall 2020, the Computing Research Association (CRA) released a series of planned white papers produced through its subcommittees (including the Computing Community Consortium (CCC)), exploring areas and issues around computing research with the potential to address national priorities over the next four years. Called Quadrennial Papers, the white papers attempt to portray a broad picture of computing research detailing potential research directions, challenges, and recommendations for policymakers and the computing research community.  […]