Election to the National Academy of Engineering – which has roughly 2,000 members across a dozen fields – is one of the highest professional honors accorded to engineers in academia, industry and government. Today, the NAE Class of 2013 was announced – 69 new Members and 11 new Foreign Associates.  Elected in Section 5, Computer Science & Engineering, were: Anant Agarwal, president, edX (online learning initiative of MIT and Harvard University), and professor, electrical engineering and computer science department, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge. For contributions to shared-memory and multicore computer architectures. David Dill, professor, department of computer science, Stanford University, Stanford, Calif. For the development of techniques to verify hardware, software, […]

Check out CCC council member Lance Fortnow’s blog, “Computational Complexity.” Today’s post focuses on postdocs in computer science. Anita Jones is troubled by the growing number of postdocs in computer science, she uses “troubling” twice in the first paragraph of her CACM Viewpoint. But is it really a troubling trend or just a natural outgrowth of a maturing field?   Theoretical computer science leads computer science in having and even embracing a postdoc culture. Nearly every graduating PhD in theoretical computer science that remains in academia takes a postdoc position before taking an tenure-track job. If anything I hear theorists lamenting a drop in theory postdocs this year with the end […]