May

28

DoD support of university research

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Attached is a new DoD directive, reinforcing and clarifying the role of fundamental research at universities.  Roughly speaking, the new DARPA policies governing fundamental research at universities are now being adopted across all of DoD.  This means no pre-publication reviews, no export controls, and no issues with foreign researchers, except in “rare and exceptional circumstances.”

It’s remarkably how rapidly things are returning to a sane state!

May

25

Report from NCWIT

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(Contributed by Dr. Christine Alvarado, Harvey Mudd College)

The National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT) annual summit took place last Tuesday through Thursday in Portland, OR. Hundreds of people dedicated to increasing the number of women in the IT field packed Portland’s Hotel Monaco and Intel’s Jones Farm campus to experience a stimulating three days of conversation and presentations on the state of women in information technology in education (K-12 and higher ed), industry, and government.

For those not familiar with NCWIT, it is a non-profit coalition of organizations whose goal is to increase women’s participation in information technology. It is concerned with all sectors, and its member organizations are are organized into four “Alliances”:

The Academic Alliance (post-secondary education organizations),
the K-12 Alliance,
the Entrepreneurial Alliance,
and the Workforce Alliance.

With the help of its member organizations and its Social Science Advisory Board, NCWIT develops and promotes techniques proven to increase women’s participation in IT.

This year, one of the prominent themes of the summit was bias, both explicit and implicit, and its effects on women. The Academic Alliance (AA) meeting began with a fascinating talk from Dr. Bernice Sandler, considered “The Godmother of Title IX”.  In her talk, Dr. Sandler provided numerous practical tips for recognizing and responding to sexual harassment and other forms of more subtle bias.

In the keynote talk on Wednesday morning, Brian Nosek gave us a fascinating look at implicit bias in which he described the Implicit Association Test, a psychological instrument for measuring implicit bias. He presented research that shows that most people in the US, both men and women, tend to implicitly associate “male” with “science” and “female” with “arts and humanities.” In addition, this bias is correlated with female’s lower self-confidence and indeed lower performance in mathematics. You can read more about this research and take the implicit association test yourself here.

The resources table also featured one of its newest Promising Practices: How to avoid unintended gender bias in letters of recommendation.

Of course there were many other exciting panels, talks and discussions–including a panel about the state of computing in Washington DC in which Cameron Wilson, ACM’s director of public policy, implored the community to stop reinventing
new terms for the same concept (Computing, Computational Thinking, Computer Science, etc) because we’re confusing the very people on the Hill that we need to be advocating for our interests.

I’ll focus on only one more highlight: the summit reception at the Eco Trust Natural Capital Center.  There, NCWIT honored about a dozen local high schoolers who had received the brand new Portland Metro NCWIT Award for Aspirations in Computing. It seems clear that we have some great talent coming through the pipeline.

And finally, who could forget the guest of honor: Computer Engineer Barbie, who in her infinite fashion wisdom tells us that “C# is the new pink.”

Sound like fun? Well, then I’ll close with a short advertisement. I am assuming that many of you reading this blog post are from higher ed. If you are not yet part of the NCWIT Academic Alliance, please consider joining. All you need to join is a commitment to working torwards a  change that will postively impact women at your institution.

For more information, please contact the AA program manager Kim Kalahar or the AA Co-chairs: Nancy Amato (Texas A&M), Maureen Biggers (Indiana University), or Andrew Williams (Spelman College).

May

16

The Computing Community Consortium At Three – A Quick Self-Assessment

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The Computing Community Consortium was launched three years ago –- in the Spring of 2007. The “long version” of what we’ve been up to is detailed in a formal self-assessment submitted to NSF in the Summer of 2009. The “PowerPoint version” is contained in an overview slideset. Here, I’m going to focus on just a few specific activities, to argue the benefits of having our act together as a field.

Broad agenda-setting

During the transition period to the Obama administration, we had the opportunity to feed a number of “white papers” into the transition team’s planning process.  Thanks to the receptiveness of the incoming administration, these white papers had impact far beyond what we had dared to imagine.

Our approach was to focus on the fact that fundamental advances in computer science and computer engineering are essential to meeting the nation’s challenges and achieving the nation’s priorities.  America’s energy future, from transportation to the smart grid, depends essentially on fundamental advances in computer science and computer engineering.  Ditto for the transformation of health care.  Ditto for the future of education.  Ditto for 21st century data-driven discovery — “eScience” — which will be transformational, ubiquitous, and driven by fundamental advances in computer science and computer engineering.

This approach does not position our field a “tool” of other fields, because it is not about applying today’s technology.  Rather, it focuses on the fundamental advances in computer science and computer engineering that will be necessary to meet the nation’s challenges and achieve the nation’s priorities.

This work was done pro bono by a small number of people.  (Committees produce consensus; leaders produce visions.)  And it was carried out as what computer architects would call “speculative execution” — effort devoted in the belief that it might prove to be useful.  (If you wait until someone asks you for something, it’s too late — you need to have it ready!)

Focused agenda-setting

The CCC funds workshops initiated by members of sub-fields who want to chart a future direction.  Some of these have been hugely influential.

A great example is a robotics effort led by Henrik Christensen (Georgia Tech), Vijay Kumar (Penn), Matt Mason (CMU), and others.  This broad community effort, carried out over a period of 18 months, yielded a coherent direction for fundamental research in robotics, a set of “research roadmaps” for the field, and a white paper that is likely to result in a significant federal research initiative during the next fiscal year.

Computing Innovation Fellows

During the 2008-09 academic year it became clear that, due to the economic downturn, many extremely strong Ph.D. graduates would “exit the research game” due to lack of employment opportunities at universities and industrial research labs — sacrificing the nation’s investment in their education, and jeopardizing the nation’s future competitiveness.

Computer science had never had a broad-based coordinated postdoc program, but the Computing Community Consortium, working closely with NSF, was able to establish the Computing Innovation Fellows Project in remarkably short order — from concept to awards in less than six months.  It was NSF’s confidence in CCC as a “proxy” for the computing research community that made this possible.

The CIFellows Project had several unique aspects that we expect to have broad impact.  The first was the “max 2 rule” — at most two awardees were allowed to come from, or go to, any one institution.  (The goal was to establish persistent interactions between diverse institutions.)  The second was an ordering of the holistic quality assessment of candidates:  at each iteration (as the field was reduced from 500+ proposals to 60 awards), members of under-represented groups (women, minorities, particular research areas, etc.) were discussed first.  When the dust had settled, 42% of CIFellows awardees were women!  (To be clear:  gender only influenced the order of discussion!)

Summary

There’s lots more to say, but this is getting long for a blog post.  The bottom line is that a group of community-oriented research leaders can have a profound effect, given the endorsement (confidence and good will) of the research community, and the right environment in Washington.

There are many, many ways in which you can participate.  See the CCC web page for ideas!

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