The Computing Research Association

Computing Research News

February 2013 Vol. 25/No.2 ∫ Download PDF Version - 3.7 Mb ∫

In Memoriam

Former CRA Board member Jim Horning passed away peacefully on January 18, 2013. Jim served on the CRA Board from 2001-04, and remained active with CRA including serving as CRA representative to various external groups.

Fiscal Cliff Deal Isn’t a Deal for Science

By Peter Harsha (Director of Government Affairs, CRA) & Melissa Norr (Policy Analyst, CRA) Full Article

With the early morning January 1st deal to avert the “fiscal cliff” reached in the Senate -- a deal that the House would ultimately approve — the 24-hour news networks turned off their fiscal cliff countdown clocks and turned instead to analyzing “what it all means.” Those discussions invariably focused on the tax implications of the deal — the extension of most of the Bush-era tax cuts. What was largely glossed over in the aftermath was the deal’s impact on federal spending and whether Congress had solved the problem of the looming sequester that threatened to cut up to 10 percent from nearly every discretionary spending account in the budget. The fact was, Congress had not solved the problem, it had merely elected to kick the problem down the road a bit farther out of sight.

CRA Announces Four New Board Members

By CRA Staff Full Article

There are four new additions to the CRA Board of Directors. David A. Bader, Georgia Institute of Technology, is the new IEEE-CS Representative. Julia Hirschberg, Columbia University, and P. Takis Metaxas, Wellesley College, replace members who resigned, and their terms end June 30, 2014. Henry Kautz, University of Rochester, is the new AAAI representative.

Harnessing Human Intellect for Computing

By Shar Steed, CRA Communications Specialist Full Article

The border between what computers and people are able do has been shifting over time. How might computers and people work together to solve difficult problems? In recent years, interest has been growing in the emerging interdisciplinary area of Human Computation, a field that explores principles and applications around giving computing systems programmatic access to human intellect to perform some aspect of computation, whether involving individuals or groups of people (“the crowd”).

Computer Science Postdocs: Best Practices

By Anita Jones, University of Virginia, and Erwin Gianchandani, CRA/CCC (now at NSF) Full Article

The Computing Research Association’s (CRA) Board of Directors has approved a Best Practices Guide, providing guidance to graduate students, postdocs, advisors and mentors, and departments and institutions on how to have a positive postdoctoral experience within computer science and engineering.

2012 CAPP Advanced Career Mentoring Workshop

By Erik Russell, CRA Director of Programs Full Article

The Computing Research Association’s Committee on the Status of Women in Computing Research (CRA-W) recently held the 2012 CAPP Advanced Career Mentoring Workshop in San Francisco, CA on November 16-17, 2012. The goal of the CAPP Workshop is to increase the percentage of Computer Science and Engineering women faculty members and researchers/scientists who reach the top of their respective career tracks.

Tiretracks to Innovation in Information Technology

By Peter Lee (Microsoft Research) Full Article

Research, in its purest form, is an endeavor that is largely unplanned and curiosity-driven, sometimes involving years or even decades of trial-and-error (and, at times, self-deprecating humor).The tiretracks diagram is designed to support each of us in the computing research community in telling our stories about how basic research contributes to new possibilities and economic growth. Many more stories need to be written and told. In order to facilitate the development of these stories, the Computing Community Consortium, in collaboration with Microsoft Research, will produce a series of short articles, to appear in the next six issues. Each article will give one story as an illustration of the concepts depicted in the tiretracks diagram.