CRA-W Announces New Co-Chairs

By CRA Full Article

Lori A. Clarke and Lori L. Pollock have been selected as the next co-chairs of CRA-W and began their three-year term in October.

ACM SIGCSE Sponsors First International Computing Education Research (ICER2005) Workshop

By Mark Guzdial, Sally Fincher, and Richard Anderson Full Article

The University of Washington, Seattle hosted the first International Computing Education Research (ICER) workshop the first weekend of October 2005. Sponsored by ACM SIGCSE, the gathering drew nearly 60 participants from America, Europe, Asia, and Australia to present and discuss research on how people come to understand computing, and how to improve that understanding. The presentations addressed issues ranging from explaining why some students succeed in their first computing courses, to developing evaluation metrics for student programming environments, to considering how much paradigm or language really matter in teaching programming.

Computing Education and Careers: Perceptions, Myth, and Reality

Musings from the Chair

By Dan Reed, CRA Board Chair Full Article

If one believes the popular press, computer science careers are going the way of the passenger pigeon and the woolly mammoth.Of course, we know better. First, we’ve “seen this movie before” as enrollments dipped in the 1980s, before skyrocketing again during the dot-com boom. Some degree of oscillation is inevitable in a field where the core technologies evolve so rapidly.

Results of CRA 2004 Salary Survey of Computing Research Staff in Industrial Labs

By Dick Waters Full Article

In December 2004 and January 2005, CRA conducted its eighth annual salary survey of computing research staff in industrial laboratories. Twelve organizations representing 879 researchers responded. Of these 879 researchers, 76% held PhDs, 17% master’s degrees, 7% bachelor’s degrees, and 3 had no degree.

NSF/CISE Plans GENI Initiative

By Peter A. Freeman, NSF Full Article

CISE is planning an initiative called “Global Environment for Networking Investigations” (GENI) to explore new networking and other capabilities that will advance science and stimulate innovation and economic growth. The GENI Initiative responds to an urgent and important challenge of the 21st century to improve significantly the capabilities provided by networking and distributed system architectures.

Restrictions on Foreign Scientists Could Threaten U.S. Research

Commerce and Defense Propose New Regulations for Research Institutions

By Peter Harsha Full Article

For more than 50 years the United States has attracted the best minds in the world to study, teach, and work—an influx of talent that has helped the nation become the world’s dominant economic power, driven its military ascendancy, and improved the lives of its citizens. But changing government policies may put that influx at risk, as regulators threaten to clamp down on the freedom of foreign nationals to pursue research and work with cutting-edge technologies in U.S. universities, federal labs, and companies.