CRA Election Results and Board Changes

By CRA

CRA recently elected five new members to its Board of Directors. They will begin three-year terms on July 1, 2012.

Corinna Cortes is the founder and head of Google Research, NY. She has spoken at numerous events organized by Women in CS, Women in Machine Learning, and IEEE Women in Engineering (since 2003). She twice hosted a STEM program at Google, NY, Technovation challenge involving 50 high school girls over 10 evenings learning to program Android apps and competing against other teams from across the country (2011 and 2012). She was an NSF Panel Member in Information Technology and Datamining (2003-05). Cortes holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Rochester, NY. Her research work is well known in particular for the algorithms for support vector machines (SVMs) for which she, jointly with Vladimir Vapnik, received the 2008 Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award.

Jeanne Ferrante is Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, Associate Dean of Engineering and Associate Vice Chancellor of Faculty Equity at the Jacobs School of Engineering at UC San Diego. She is a Fellow of IEEE (2005) and ACM (1996). Since 2003 she has been involved in a number of CRA-W activities. At UCSD Ferrante co-founded Teams in Engineering Service, an academic program that pairs multidisciplinary teams of students with non-profits to solve their technical problems. Created in 2004, the program now has nearly 500 student enrollments per year. Her research interests include transforming computer programs to make better use of parallelism and memory; and increasing understanding of how academic careers unfold over time in ways that may affect career outcomes for under-represented faculty in science and engineering disciplines. Ferrante is a PhD graduate of MIT in Mathematics.

Lance Fortnow is Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Northwestern University. As of July 1, he will become Chair of the School of Computer Science at Georgia Tech. He is an ACM Fellow (2007); NSF Presidential Faculty Fellow (1992-98); and was a Fulbright Scholar in the Netherlands in 1996-97. Fortnow is a member of the Computing Community Consortium Council (2010-present); co-chaired the Selection Committee for CI Fellows in 2011; and currently chairs the CCC Visioning Committee. He chairs ACM SIGACT (2009-12) and the Local Academic Advisory Committee of Toyota Technological Institute-Chicago (2003-present). He was Founding Editor in Chief, ACM Transactions on Computation Theory (2007-10), and served on the Executive Committee of DIMACS (2000-03). His research interests include: theoretical computer science; and computational complexity with applications to micro-economic theory. Fortnow was awarded a PhD in Applied Mathematics from MIT.

Kathryn McKinley is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft and an Endowed Professor of Computer Science at the University of Texas, Austin. A Fellow of both IEEE and ACM, she received the ACM SIGPLAN Distinguished Service Award 2011. Currently a co-chair of CRA-W, she served on its board since 2009 and has played an active role as a member. McKinley was a session panelist at the 2008 Conference at Snowbird. She was a member of the National Academies’ Study on Sustaining Growth in Computer Performance (2007-10); an Intellectual Leader for Programming Languages and Compilers, NSF CSR Future Directions Study (2010); and a committee member of DARPA’s study on Reliability in Extreme Scale Systems (2008-09). Her research interests include: compilers; virtual machines; memory management; security; reliability; architecture; measurement and benchmarking. McKinley graduated from Rice University with a PhD in computer science.

Greg Morrisett is a Professor in the School of Engineering & Applied Sciences at Harvard University where he served as Associate Dean for Computer Science & Electrical Engineering from 2007-10. He is a member of the NSF CISE Advisory Committee (2008-present), was a member of the ACM SIGPLAN Executive Committee (2007-10), and served on DARPA ISAT (2006-09). Currently Morrisett is Editor of JACM, CACM Research Highlights, Information Processor Letters, and previously was Editor of J. Functional Programming. Awards received include the Allen Newell Medal of Research Excellence (2001); Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists & Engineers (2000); National Science Foundation Career Award (1999); Alfred P. Sloan Fellow (1998); and 10-Year Best Papers for both PLDI (1996) and POPL (1998). His research interests include programming languages, compilers, type systems and type theory, formal methods, and software security. Morrisett received a PhD in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University.

Four current board members, Eric Grimson (MIT), H.V. Jagadish (University of Michigan), Margaret Martonosi (Princeton) and Sarita Adve (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign) were re-elected to three-year terms.

The terms of four board members will end June 30, 2012. Bill Aspray (University of Texas in Austin) will rotate off the board after serving the maximum three terms. Aspray previously was CRA’s Executive Director from 1996 to 2002. Completing two terms on the board is Annie Anton (currently North Carolina State University; as of July 1, Chair of the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech). Two industry/lab members, Limor Fix (Intel) and Peter Norvig (Google) were appointed to serve one-year terms in slots vacated when two members resigned. We acknowledge with thanks the contributions of all to CRA.