The Computing Research Association (CRA) and Computing Community Consortium (CCC) are pleased to announce a new Computing Innovation Fellows (CIFellows) Program for 2020. This program recognizes the significant disruption to the academic job search caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and associated economic uncertainty and aims to provide a career-enhancing bridge experience for recent and soon-to-be PhD graduates in computing.  The goal of the program is to create career growth opportunities that support maintaining the computing research pipeline. Computing research is defined as any area included under the National Science Foundation (NSF) Computing and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Directorate. This effort takes inspiration from CRA/CCC’s NSF-funded Computing Innovation Fellows Programs […]

The following is a guest blog from CCC Chair Mark D. Hill.  In these troubled times of COVID-19, it is especially helpful to remember a joie de vivre. The Women of (Computer Science) Theory (WIT) convincingly demonstrate this—together but with appropriate social distance—in WIT Presents – I Will Survive (3 minutes). Several performers have connections with the Computing Research Association (CRA) and the Computing Community Consortium (CCC), including CCC Council member Ronitt Rubinfeld (MIT) and former CCC Council member Tal Rabin (Algorand Foundation). Rebecca Wright (Barnard College) is on the CRA-Widening Participation Board of Directors, Shuchi Chawla (University of Wisconsin Madison) attended the CCC Theoretical Foundations for Social Computing in 2015, […]

The Donald E. Knuth Prize is awarded yearly for outstanding contributions to the foundations of computer science over an extended period of time. This year the Donald E. Knuth Prize will be awarded to former Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council member Cynthia Dwork of Harvard University for fundamental and lasting contributions to computer science. From the announcement: “Dwork is one of the most influential theoretical computer scientists of her generation. Her research has transformed several fields, most notably distributed systems, cryptography, and data privacy, and her current work promises to add fairness in algorithmic decision making to the list. She is widely known for the introduction and development of dierential privacy, […]

The Computing Research Association (CRA), in consultation with the National Science Foundation (NSF), has appointed six new members to the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council:  Kathleen Fisher, Tufts University William D. Gropp, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Brian LaMacchia, Microsoft Research Melanie Moses, University of New Mexico Helen Nissenbaum, Cornell Tech Holly Yanco, UMass Lowell Beginning July 1, the new members will each serve three-year terms. The CCC Council is comprised of 20 members who have expertise in diverse areas of computing. They are instrumental in leading CCC’s visioning programs, which help catalyze and enable ideas for future computing research. Members serve staggered three-year terms that rotate every July. The CCC […]

About a month ago, at the beginning of this pandemic, the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) blogged about Running a Virtual Conference and highlighted Blair MacIntyre, a professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Interactive Computing and IEEE VR conference co-chair, and Kyle Johnsen, an associate professor in the University of Georgia’s College of Engineering, when they transitioned the IEEE VR 2020 Conference to an all-virtual event. See that blog here. Since then, the research community has started to adjust to this new normal and transition to virtual conferences. This includes the ACM Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS 2020), which was also held online in March. […]

In March 2020, the National Science Foundation (NSF) announced the first ten recipients of the NSF Program on Fairness in Artificial Intelligence in Collaboration with Amazon (FAI).  From the solicitation: NSF and Amazon are partnering to jointly support computational research focused on fairness in AI, with the goal of contributing to trustworthy AI systems that are readily accepted and deployed to tackle grand challenges facing society. Specific topics of interest include, but are not limited to transparency, explainability, accountability, potential adverse biases and effects, mitigation strategies, algorithmic advances, fairness objectives, validation of fairness, and advances in broad accessibility and utility. Funded projects will enable broadened acceptance of AI systems, helping […]