We’re launching something brand new today! The Computing Community Consortium’s Research Community & Student Outreach Subcommittee is pleased to announce a unique new website for undergraduates in computing fields hoping to learn more about summer research opportunities as well as the process for applying to graduate school in computer science. The website contains: A section on what graduate school in computer science is all about (including frequently-asked-questions with answers by current graduate students and faculty); Information, advice, and insights on how to apply to graduate school in computer science (including another set of FAQs with answers by students who have just been through the process as well as faculty); and The […]

The Chief Information Officers Council (CIOC), working closely with the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), has just launched the Technology Fellows Program “to help the Federal government compete more effectively with the private sector for IT talent” and ultimately “increase the Federal government’s pool of qualified IT professionals.” From the official program announcement: The Chief Information Officers Council is recruiting the nation’s best and brightest IT and computer science professionals for the newly created Technology Fellows Program… aimed at cutting bureaucratic barriers to entering public service and providing access to unique career opportunities in Federal Agencies to highly talented technology professionals.   Through a competitive application process, recent graduates of top […]

Following up on an article about rising enrollments in computer science this past Saturday, The New York Times has just published a fabulous Room for Debate essay series titled “Computer Science’s ‘Sputnik Moment’?“: Computer science is a hot major again. It had been in the doldrums after the dot-com bust a decade ago, but with the social media gold rush and the success of “The Social Network,” computer science departments are transforming themselves to meet the demand. At Harvard, the size of the introductory computer science class has nearly quadrupled in five years.   The spike has raised hopes of a ripple effect throughout the American education system — so much so […]

There’s a great article in today’s New York Times describing the recent rise in enrollments in computer science — spurred in part by “Hollywood’s portrayal of the tech world, as well as celebrity entrepreneurs like Steven P. Jobs of Apple and [Mark] Zuckerberg [of Facebook] who make products that students use every day.” On the rise in enrollments: The number of computer science degrees awarded in the United States began rising in 2010, and will reach 11,000 this year, after plummeting each year since the end of the dot-com bubble in 2004, according to the Computing Research Association, which tracks enrollment and degrees… The number of students who are pursuing the degree […]

Farnam Jahanian, the Assistant Director for CISE, testified at a U.S. House of Representatives hearing on May 25th. The hearing, convened jointly by the Subcommittee on Technology and Innovation and the Subcommittee on Research and Science Education, examined Federal agency efforts to improve our nation’s cybersecurity and prepare the future cybersecurity talent needed for preserving national security. As part of his testimony, Jahanian listed a series of contributions the computing research community has made with support from NSF and other Federal funding agencies: Cryptographic schemes and cryptographic-based authentication, enabling today’s Internet commerce, supporting secure digital signatures and online credit card transactions Program analyses and verification techniques, enabling the early detection of […]

The Computing Research Association recently published the results of its annual Taulbee Survey, and the numbers of PostDocs rose to record levels, continuing a trend that we have witnessed for more than a decade — and bringing new meaning to the CRA’s PostDoc white paper effort. Background As we have blogged here before, CRA — the umbrella organization of the CCC — initiated an effort last fall to engage the community in a conversation about PostDocs, at a time when a growing number of new CS PhDs appeared to be going that route. A committee commissioned by CRA prepared a white paper reporting the statistics associated with academic and industry […]