CCC Announces 2011 Computing Innovation Fellows: CIFellows Project Continues to Seek to Retain Recent PhDs in Computing Research
WASHINGTON, DC, Oct. 14, 2011
The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) - a standing committee of the Computing Research Association (CRA) - today named 20 exceptional recent Ph.D. graduates in computer science (and allied fields) to its 2011 class of Computing Innovation Fellows (CIFellows; http://cifellows.org/). These 20 talented researchers have been competitively awarded postdoctoral positions of up to two years at academic institutions and industrial research laboratories throughout the U.S. Made possible by a $6.5 million National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to CRA - the third grant in as many years - the 2011 CIFellowships are a continuation of the highly successful effort begun in 2009 to forestall a permanent loss of research talent likely to occur as a consequence of the financial crisis and subsequent economic downturn.
The new cohort of CIFellows is comprised of 20 individuals from 18 different Ph.D-granting colleges and universities within the U.S., and collectively the CIFellows are assigned to mentors at 17 unique host organizations. They were selected from a pool of 177 applicants, spanning 76 different Ph.D.-granting colleges and universities.
With support from the NSF, CRA provides each organization hosting a CIFellow a one-year subaward, to include a 12-month salary plus fringe benefits to the CIFellow as well as an allowance to be used at the CIFellow's discretion for the purchase of a computer and laboratory equipment, conference travel, relocation expenses, and other discretionary expenses in support of his or her research plan. (Those CIFellows who wish to continue for a second year are provided a new subaward covering that period, contingent upon a positive mid-year evaluation and the availability of funds.) Like the 2009 and 2010 CIFellows that came before them, it is intended that these subawards will enable the 2011 CIFellows to have uniquely independent research experiences that will help them sharpen their skills and enhance their credentials over the next one to two years.
To ensure broad participation in the program and to cultivate bridges between diverse institutions via the CIFellows, no more than two awardees earned their Ph.D.s from the same university, and no more than two awardees were assigned to the same host organization. Diversity of other forms - including research areas and individuals, etc. - were also encouraged. About 30 percent of the 2011 CIFellows are women.
The awarding of a third cohort of CIFellows follows very positive and beneficial experiences for the 2009 and 2010 CIFellows and their mentors. Of the 60 CIFellows who started in the fall of 2009, 39 have taken permanent research positions in academia, industry, and government. In addition, roughly halfway through their two-year CIFellowships, five of the 47 2010 CIFellows have announced plans to depart the program early following offers of permanent research opportunities. In most of these cases, the postdoctoral experiences markedly enhanced the CIFellows' skills, credentials, and already stellar resumes. As one hiring officer wrote, "I can attest that [the CIFellow's] postdoctoral experience … enhanced [the CIFellow's] attractiveness to us as a candidate."
While it remains too early to provide an authoritative assessment of the impact of the CIFellows Project in the long term, an independent evaluation by SRI International commissioned in fall 2010 concluded in part, "The results of this evaluation suggest that the design of the program helped to provide the CIFellows with the foundations for productive careers as research leaders and principal investigators… The CIFellows Project appears to have achieved its short-term objectives of providing interim employment to early-career computing researchers, at least some of whom might have left the field without such support."
Like the inaugural class, the 2011 CIFellows were selected through an intensive review process that considered applicants' research backgrounds, proposed research projects, and proposed mentors. A Selection Committee evaluated each application and recommended a slate of finalists to a Steering Committee. The latter - comprising co-principal investigators (PIs) of the three NSF grants supporting the CIFellows Project since 2009 - provided administrative, financial, and technical oversight, and was ultimately responsible for all award decisions. The PI of the 2011 NSF grant, M. Frans Kaashoek (MIT), chaired both committees.
The Selection Committee included:
Philip Bohannon, Yahoo! Research
Henrik Christensen, Georgia Institute of Technology
Prem Devanbu, University of California at Davis
Bill Feiereisen, Intel Corporation
Lisa Fleischer, Dartmouth College
James Fogarty, University of Washington
Stephanie Forrest, University of New Mexico
Lance Fortnow, Northwestern University
Greg Ganger, Carnegie Mellon University
Darren Gergle, Northwestern University
Gregory Hager, Johns Hopkins University
Eric Horvitz, Microsoft Research
Frans Kaashoek, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (chair)
David Kaeli, Northeastern University
Leslie Pack Kaelbling, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Jim Kurose, Microsoft Research
John Mitchell, Stanford University
Rob Miller, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Robin Murphy, Texas A&M University
Hanspeter Pfister, Harvard University
Ion Stoica, University of California at Berkeley
Jim Waldo, VMware
The Steering Committee included:
Greg Andrews, University of Arizona
Lance Fortnow, Northwestern University
Erwin Gianchandani, Computing Research Association
Susan Graham, University of California at Berkeley
Gregory Hager, Johns Hopkins University
Anita Jones, University of Virginia
Frans Kaashoek, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
Ed Lazowska, University of Washington
Ran Libeskind-Hadas, Harvey Mudd College
Bobby Schnabel, Indiana University
Bob Sproull, Oracle Labs (ret.)
The 2011 class of CIFellows and their mentors includes:
| CIFellow | Ph.D.-granting university | Research area | Mentor | Host organization |
| Amin Ansari | University of Michigan | Hardware/architecture | Josep Torrellas | University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign |
| Ferhat Ay | University of Florida | Scientific/medical informatics | William Noble | University of Washington |
| Selina Chu | University of Southern California | AI/machine learning/robotics/vision | Thomas Dietterich | Oregon State University |
| Shay Cohen | Carnegie Mellon University | AI/machine learning/robotics/vision | Michael Collins | Colubmia University |
| Travis Deyle | Georgia Institute of Technology | AI/machine learning/robotics/vision | Matt Reynolds | Duke University |
| David Feil-Seifer | University of Southern California | AI/machine learning/robotics/vision | Brian Scassellati | Yale University |
| Lakshmi Ganesh | Cornell University | Networks/operating systems | Michael Dahlin | University of Texas at Austin |
| Jonathan Huang | Carnegie Mellon University | AI/machine learning/robotics/vision | Leonidas Guibas | Stanford University |
| Mohit Tiwari | University of California at Santa Barbara | Hardware/architecture | Krste Asanovic' | University of California at Berkeley |
| Hemanta Maji | University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign | Information systems/information science | Amit Sahai | University of California at Los Angeles |
| David Mimno | Univesrity of Massachusetts at Amherst | AI/machine learning/robotics/vision | David Blei | Princeton University |
| Ankur Moitra | Massachusetts Institute of Technology | Theory/algorithms | Avi Widgerson | Institute for Advanced Study |
| Rohan Murty | Harvard University | Networks/operating systems | Hari Balakrishnan | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| Joshua Reich | Columbia University | Networks/operating systems | Jennifer Rexford | Princeton University |
| Suchi Saria | Stanford University | Scientific/medical informatics | Kenneth Mandl | Children's Hospital Boston |
| Erin Solovey | Tufts University | HCI/CSCW | Mary Cummings | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| Ian Stevenson | Northwestern University | Other -- computational neuroscience | Bruno Olshausen | University of California at Berkeley |
| Kalliopi (Kelly) Tsota | Purdue University | Software engineering | Jason Cong | University of California at Los Angeles |
| Lirong Xia | Duke University | AI/machine learning/robotics/vision | David Parkes | Harvard University |
| Hong-Sheng Zhou | University of Connecticut | Information systems/information science | Jonathan Katz | University of Maryland |
And the 2010 CIFellows who are continuing for a second year include:
| CIFellow | Ph.D.-granting university | Research area | Mentor | Host organization |
| Jae-wook Ahn | University of Pittsburgh | Information systems/information science | Ben Shneiderman | University of Maryland-College Park |
| Alvin AuYoung | University of California-San Diego | Networks/operating systems | Partha Ranganathan | HP Labs |
| Aruna Balasubramanian | University of Massachusetts-Amherst | Mobile/ubiquitous/embedded computing | David Wetherall | University of Washington |
| Robert Bocchino | University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign | Programming languages/compilers | Jonathan Aldrich | Carnegie Mellon University |
| Lillian Chang* | Carnegie Mellon University | AI/machine learning/robotics/vision | Joshua Smith | Intel Corp. |
| Yanhua Chen | Wayne State University | Scientific/medical informatics | Peter Song | University of Michigan |
| Marc Chiarini | Tufts University | Networks/operating systems | Margo Seltzer | Harvard University |
| David Choffnes | Northwestern University | Networks/operating systems | Tom Anderson | University of Washington |
| Tamara Clegg | Georgia Institute of Technology | CS education/educational technology | Allison Druin | University of Maryland-College Park |
| Jyotirmoy Deshmukh | University of Texas-Austin | Software engineering | Rajeev Alur | University of Pennsylvania |
| Xiaoning Ding | Ohio State University-Main Campus | Networks/operating systems | Phillip Gibbons | Intel Corp. |
| David Doty | Iowa State University | Theory/algorithms | Erik Winfree | California Institute of Technology |
| Samuel Gordon | University of Maryland-College Park | CS education/educational technology | Tal Malkin | Columbia University |
| Elena Grigorescu | Massachusetts Institute of Technology | Theory/algorithms | Chris Peikert | Georgia Institute of Technology |
| Haryadi Gunawi | University of Wisconsin-Madison | Networks/operating systems | Joseph Hellerstein | University of California-Berkeley |
| David Harmon | Columbia University | Graphics/visualization | Denis Zorin | New York University |
| Timothy Havens | University of Missouri-Columbia | Databases/information retrieval/data mining | Anil Jain | Michigan State University |
| Michael Hay | University of Massachusetts-Amherst | Databases/information retrieval/data mining | Johannes Gehrke | Cornell University |
| Houman Homayoun | University of California-Irvine | Hardware/architecture | Dean Tullsen | University of California-San Diego |
| Shaili Jain | Harvard University | Social computing/social informatics | Joan Feigenbaum | Yale University |
| Saket Joshi | Tufts University | AI/machine learning/robotics/vision | Prasad Tadepalli | Oregon State University |
| Thomas Kiehl | Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute | Other -- systems biology, evolutionary computing | Scott Tenenbaum | University of Albany |
| Samantha Kleinberg | New York University | Scientific/medical informatics | George Hripcsak | Columbia University |
| J. Zico Kolter | Stanford University | AI/machine learning/robotics/vision | Russ Tedrake | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| Lukas Kroc | Cornell University | AI/machine learning/robotics/vision | Allon Percus | Claremont Graduate University |
| Vijay Kumar | Ohio State University-Main Campus | Numerical computing/HPC/data-intensive scalable computing | Jay Wylie | HP Labs |
| Homin Lee | Columbia University | Theory/algorithms | Adam Klivans | University of Texas-Austin |
| Yuliya Lierler | University of Texas-Austin | AI/machine learning/robotics/vision | Miroslaw Truszczynski | University of Kentucky |
| Xiaojuan Ma | Princeton University | HCI/CSCW | Jodi Forlizzi | Carnegie Mellon University |
| Amon Millner | Massachusetts Institute of Technology | CS education/educational technology | Lynn Stein | Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering |
| Arifa Nisar | Northwestern University | Numerical computing/HPC/data-intensive scalable computing | Ethan Miller | University of California-Santa Cruz |
| Amit Pande | Iowa State University | Mobile/ubiquitous/embedded computing | Prasant Mohapatra | University of California-Davis |
| Sharoda Paul* | Pennsylvania State University | HCI/CSCW | Peter Pirolli | Palo Alto Research Center |
| Brian Price | Brigham Young University | AI/machine learning/robotics/vision | Scott Cohen | Adobe Systems, Inc. |
| Dustin Reishus | University of Southern California | Other -- self-assembly/self-organization | Nikolaus Correll | University of Colorado-Boulder |
| Ricky Sethi | University of California-Riverside | AI/machine learning/robotics/vision | Yolanda Gil | University of Southern California |
| Saurabh Srivastava | University of Maryland-College Park | Programming languages/compilers | Rastislav Bodik | University of California-Berkeley |
| Erin Walker | Carnegie Mellon University | CS education/educational technology | Winslow Burleson | Arizona State University |
| Susan Wyche | Georgia Institute of Technology | Hardware/architecture | Steve Harrison | Virginia Polytechnic Institute |
| Yinglong Xia | University of Southern California | Numerical computing/HPC/data-intensive scalable computing | Anshul Gupta | IBM Research |
| Yang Xiang | Kent State University | Scientific/medical informatics | Kun Huang | Ohio State University |
| Cem Yuksel | Texas A&M University | Graphics/visualization | Doug James | Cornell University |
| Caroline Ziemkiewicz | University of North Carolina-Charlotte | Graphics/visualization | David Laidlaw | Brown University |
*Continuing for a partial second year after accepting a permanent research position.
To learn more about CIFellows from previous years: Visit http://cifellows.org/network and view their curriculum vita and research abstracts.
About the CCC: The CCC (http://cra.org/ccc) was established in fall 2006 under a cooperative agreement between the CRA and the NSF. A standing committee of the CRA, the CCC seeks to mobilize the computing research community to debate long-range challenges and build consensus around specific research visions. The CCC specifically pursues the next big computing ideas that will define the future of the field, attract the very best talent, and catalyze research investment and public support in the long term.
About the CRA: The CRA (http://cra.org/) was established nearly 40 years ago and has members at more than 250 research entities in academia, industry, and government. Its mission is to strengthen research and advance education in computing fields, expand opportunities for women and minorities, and improve public and policymaker understanding of the importance of computing and computing research in society.
For more information: Contact Dr. Erwin Gianchandani, Director of the Computing Community Consortium & Computing Innovation Fellows Project: erwin@cra.org; 202-266-2936.
