The following is a letter to the community from Margaret Martonosi (Assistant Director) and Erwin Gianchandani (Deputy Assistant Director) of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Directorate of Computer & Information Science & Engineering (CISE). CRA/CCC announced the CIFellows 2020 project last week and highlighted the upcoming 5/26 webinar earlier this week.  Dear Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Community: Words like “unprecedented” and “challenging” have been widely used to describe the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on our lives and on our research and educational communities, and yet they seem insufficient to capture the totality of the situation. Recognizing COVID-19’s significant impact on research hiring, the National Science Foundation’s CISE directorate […]

Last week the Computing Research Association (CRA) and Computing Community Consortium (CCC) announced the 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.  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%). Fellows will have the ability to select a […]

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, […]

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 […]