On August  29, 2013, Dr. Farnam Jahanian, Assistant Director of the National Science Foundation (NSF), announced the appointment of Dr. Rao Kosaraju as the new Division Director for the Computing and Communications Foundations (CCF) Division within the Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Directorate.  Below is Dr. Jahanian’s letter to the CISE community.   Dear CISE Community,   I am delighted to announce the appointment of Professsor Rao Kosaraju to the position of Director of the CISE Division of Computing and Communication Foundations (CCF), effective January 2014.   Prof. Kosaraju will be joining the National Science Foundation (NSF) from the Johns Hopkins University (JHU), where he is currently the Edward J. Schaefer Professor of Computer Science. […]

The following entry is a special contribution to this blog from Douglas H. Fisher, Associate Professor of Computer Science at Vanderbilt University. This year Doug and Carla Gomes (Cornell University) were co-chairs of the Computational Sustainability and Artificial Intelligence (AI) track at the Twenty-Seventh Conference on Artificial Intelligence on July 14-18, 2013 in Bellevue, Washington. In this entry, Doug highlights the best paper awards for this track, sponsored by the Computing Community Consortium. The Twenty-Seventh AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-13) convened last month in Bellevue, Washington. For the third consecutive year there was a special track on Computational Sustainability, a nascent and growing field of computing that is concerned […]

The Office of Science and Technology Policy is currently accepting applications for its Spring 2014 Internship Program.  The application deadline is 11:59pm Friday, October 4, 2013.  Students who are U.S. citizens and who will be actively enrolled during the Spring 2014 semester are welcome to apply. More information and application instructions are available at http://www.whitehouse.gov/ostp/about/student/. About OSTP.  The Office of Science and Technology Policy advises the President on the effects of science and technology on domestic and international affairs. The office serves as a source of scientific and technological analysis and judgment for the President with respect to major policies, plans and programs of the Federal Government. About the Internship […]

The following is a special contribution to this blog from Douglas H. Fisher, Director of the Vanderbilt Institute for Digital Learning, and Associate Professor of Computer Science and Computer Engineering at Vanderbilt University and Armando Fox, Professor in Residence of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at University of California, Berkeley. In February 2013, Doug and Armando co-chaired the Workshop on Multidisciplinary Research for Online Education (MROE). In this blog entry, they revisit that CCC-sponsored visioning activity, and also spotlight the upcoming ACM Conference on Learning at Scale, which is being co-organized by Armando. New venues for reporting scholarship on “learning at scale”, to include massive open online courses (MOOCs), are […]

The following is an article published in the August 2013 edition of Computing Research News.  Computing Researchers Get ‘Schooled’ on Science Policy at LiSPI 2013 By Peter Harsha, CRA Director of Government Affairs and Fred Schneider, Cornell University and CCC Council Member As part of its mission to develop a next generation of leaders in the computing research community, the Computing Research Association’s Computing Community Consortium recently held its second Leadership in Science Policy Institute (LiSPI). This one and a half-day workshop was intended to educate a cadre of computing researchers on how science policy in the U.S. is formulated and how our government works. Participants heard candid and “off the […]

The following is an article published in the August 2013 edition of Computing Research News.  Ideas Lab Fostering Transformative Approaches to Teaching and Learning: Data-Intensive Research to Improve Teaching and Learning By Andrew Bernat, CRA Executive Director NSF has announced a new funding opportunity to explore using large data sets to improve STEM teaching and learning environments (RFP 13-565) that will be of interest to many CRN readers. But this new activity includes a radically different funding mechanism – participation in an Ideas Lab workshop which is designed to foster novel, transformative, multidisciplinary approaches (and proposals). Participants in the Ideas Lab workshop will build interdisciplinary teams solely eligible to submit proposals […]