CRA Elects Two New Board Members

By CRA

CRA has recently elected two new members to its board of directors. They will begin three-year terms beginning July 1, 2010 to June 30, 2013.

Ronald Brachman is Vice President, Yahoo! Labs and Research Operations; and Head of Yahoo! Academic Relations. He has received a number of awards, including Fellow of the IEEE (2008); AAAI Distinguished Service Award (2008); Donald E. Walker Distinguished Service Award, International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence (2007); Office of the Secretary of Defense Medal for Exceptional Public Service (2005); and Fellow of the ACM (1999).

From 2002-05, Dr. Brachman was Director of the Information Processing Technology Office at DARPA; during that time he had numerous interactions with CRA leadership and participated in a funding agency panel at Snowbird, and he served on the Industry Committee for the CRA Conference at Snowbird (2002). As President of AAAI (2003-05) (President-Elect 2001-03, Past President 2005-07) he attended multiple CRA computing summit meetings and interacted with CRA leadership and leaders from the various member communities. He also participated in a focused CRA workshop on improving the image of Computer Science and improving CS education.

Throughout his career, Dr. Brachman has been involved with and supported a very wide variety of research and development areas in computing, helped to create major new successful industrial research labs at AT&T and Yahoo!, and hired world-class research teams. His research interests include: knowledge representation and reasoning; machine learning; cognitive systems; Web search and retrieval; and computational advertising. Dr. Brachman was awarded a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from Harvard University.

Edward Alan Fox is Professor of Computer Science at the Virginia Institute of Technology. Since founding MIT's ACM student chapter in 1968, he has extended his computing-related research, service, and teaching focused on information in areas such as digital libraries, information retrieval, and multimedia. 

A graduate of Cornell with a Ph.D. in Computer Science, he is a founder of the digital library field, and the founder of the movement supporting electronic theses and dissertation, serving as Executive Director of the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations since 1987. From 1995 to 2008, Professor Fox was Editor of Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, Inc. Series on Multimedia Information and Systems, and from 2000-06 was Co-editor-in-chief of the ACM Journal of Education Resources in Computing (now becoming ACM Transactions on Computing Education) and lead proposer of the journal (1998-2000). From 2004-08, he served as Chairman of the IEEE-CS Technical Committee on Digital Libraries, and continues in a leadership role in the Networked Computer Science Technical Reference Library. 

Awards received include the ACM Recognition of Service Award (for Editor-in-Chief, ACM Press Database and Electronic Products, 1991); ACM Recognition of Service Award 1995 (for SIGIR Chair 1991-95 and Vice-chair 1987-91); and 1st Annual Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations Leadership Award (2004). Professor Fox currently serves as a member of the Organizing Committee for CRA’s Conference at Snowbird 2010. As a board member, he will use his skills in community-building and advancing computing education to help CRA support computing researchers and educators.

Four current board members—Laura Haas (IBM Almaden Research Center); Mary Jean Harrold (Georgia Tech); Martha Pollack (University of Michigan); and Fred Schneider (Cornell University)—were re-elected to serve additional three-year terms. 

David Tennenhouse, New Venture Partners LLC, and Jeffrey Hollingsworth, University of Maryland, will complete their terms on the board on June 30. We acknowledge with thanks their many contributions to CRA during their tenure as board members.