Last month at CRA’s Conference at Snowbird the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) led an after-dinner brainstorming session, “Reboot!” to help members of the community engage in a visioning discussion. Led by Sujata Banerjee, Nadya Bliss, Liz Bradley, Bill Gropp, Dan Lopresti and Ann Schwartz, the session featured a series of discussions and idea sharing among the community pertaining to two topics chosen to inspire a lively discussion and to get people thinking outside of their areas – Neural Programming and Artificial Intelligence (AI) Customized to Human Norms. You can read the full description of each topic here. Participants were asked to find a partner and discuss a series of questions. […]

Contributions to this post were provided by Monica Lam and Jen King from Stanford University.  The New York Times recently published an article titled Stanford Team Aims at Alexa and Siri With a Privacy-Minded Alternative. Professor Monica Lam and her students, Giovanni Campagna, Silei Xu, Michael Fischer, and Mehrad Moradshahi, have developed a virtual assistant called Almond that can avoid surrendering personal information to a centralized service and encourage open competition among companies. She is joined by Stanford computer science researchers Michael Bernstein, Dan Boneh,  Jen King, James Landay, Chris Manning, and David Mazières, Chris Re in a newly funded NSF research grant to expand the capabilities and privacy protection […]

We are proud to announce the launch of a new brand for CRA and its committees. As the impact of CRA’s activities are becoming more widely recognized and valued across our industry, we decided to develop a new brand identity that reinforces and amplifies our mission, objectives and programs.  Our new brand is part of our larger effort to create a comprehensive communications strategy for CRA and its many activities. After updating our mission statement, last fall we began developing a brand that positions CRA as dynamic and collaborative, while preserving the unique identities of CRA’s distinct committees. The new CRA symbol is designed to represent great minds coming together. […]

The biennial CRA Conference at Snowbird took place last week for Chairs, Department Heads, and Lab Directors from across North America.  Nearly 300 people gathered to participate in sessions ranging in topics from issues in government surveillance using the Internet to creating a diverse Computer Science research community.  The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) led a variety of sessions throughout the conference.  Excitement was high for the programs being put on by the CCC: Computing Visions 2025: The Visions 2025 initiative was created to inspire the computing community to envision future trends and opportunities in computing research. Where is the computing field going over the next 10-15 years? What are potential […]

The Computing Community Consortium was programmed as the closing plenary session at the 2008 CRA Conference at Snowbird — a once-every-two-years gathering of the heads of CRA’s member organizations. Interest was strong — more than 125 department chairs and lab directors attended the 90-minute session, more than 3X as many as have stuck around for any previous final session at Snowbird. Ed Lazowska, Susan Graham, Richard Ladner, Randy Bryant, and Chip Elliott presented. All presentation materials are on the web here. A 20-minute Q&A session followed the presentations. Several highlights for me: CCC’s “Data-Intensive Scalable Computing” initiative, led by Randy Bryant and Thomas Kwan, has really taken off:  two new […]