Deborah Crawford, who recently left her position as NSF’s Deputy Assistant Director for CISE (Jeannette Wing’s right-hand person) to become Vice Provost for Research at Drexel University, will receive a 2010 Presidential Rank Award. The Presidential Rank Awards have been given annually by the President of the United States since the establishment of the government’s Senior Executive Service in 1978.  The Award honors high-performing senior career employees for “sustained extraordinary accomplishment.” This certainly characterizes Debbie, whose huge contributions to NSF, the computing research community, and the Computing Community Consortium will be sorely missed. Congratulations Debbie!

The CCC is interested in stimulating the development of new research visions and challenges. To do so, the CCC has been collaborating with conferences in computer science and sponsoring vision (sometimes called “crazy ideas”) sessions with travel awards for the most exciting submissions. Following the success at PLDI’s “Fun Ideas and Thoughts” session (see a prior blog entry), the CCC sponsored the Research Vision session at the 9th Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI), held Oct 4-6, 2010, in Vancouver. In collaboration with the OSDI committee, the CCC is happy to announce the winners of the Research Vision session at OSDI: 1. SIGOPS to SIGARCH: “Now it’s our […]

Our colleagues at ACM today announced a landmark report that presents, for the first time, a state-by-state breakdown of current K-12 standards for computer science education, including specific high school graduation requirements: http://www.acm.org/runningonempty. At the same time, a new non-partisan coalition of associations, corporations, scientific societies, and other non-profits was unveiled. Computing in the Core, as it’s called, comprises CRA, NCWIT, the Anita Borg Institute for Women & Technology, the Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA), Microsoft, Google, and SAS. It strives to elevate computer science education to a core academic subject in K-12 education, giving young people the college- and career-readiness skills necessary in a technology-focused society. CinC’s new website […]

Farnam Jahanian, Professor and Chair of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Michigan, today was named the next Assistant Director for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) at NSF, effective February 1, 2011. Jahanian will assume the position that Jeannette Wing successfully held for three years before returning to CMU in early July. For Jahanian’s complete bio, see http://www.eecs.umich.edu/~farnam/bio.htm. The official NSF announcement is available here.