The following originally appeared on the CRA Bulletin, written by Matt Hazenbush, Director of Communications    The Computing Research Association (CRA) is excited to announce the naming of Mary Lou Maher, PhD to the position of Director of Research Community Initiatives. An accomplished researcher with leadership experience that spans the settings of universities, large research projects, and the National Science Foundation (NSF), Dr. Maher joins CRA from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, where she most recently served as a professor in the Department of Software and Information Systems and previously served as the Department Chair.  In her new role, Dr. Maher will assume responsibility as the director of […]

  On Tuesday, the NSF announced the Responsible Design, Development, & Deployment of Technologies (ReDDDot) program, which aims to ensure both ethical and legal considerations from community and societal standpoints are established in the technology pipeline, from inception to deployment. This $16 million program will be a collaborative effort between the NSF and five philanthropic partners: the Ford Foundation, the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation, Pivotal Ventures, Siegel Family Endowment, and the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fund for Strategic Innovation.   Below is more information from the program’s public announcement:   Who Can Submit Proposals: Multidisciplinary, multi-sector teams that demonstrate the principles, methodologies, and impacts associated with responsible design, development and […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is charged with enabling the pursuit of innovative, high-impact computing research that aligns with pressing national and global challenges. Established in 2006 through a cooperative agreement between the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Computing Research Association (CRA), the CCC provides a voice for the national computing research community, facilitating the development of a bold, multi-themed visions for computing research and communicating that vision to a wide range of stakeholders. To fulfill its mission, the CCC seeks visionary leaders — people with great ideas, sound judgment, and the willingness to work collaboratively to see things through to completion. The Council is composed of 20-24 […]

Ann Schwartz, who has dedicated 11 years to the Computing Research Association (CRA) and the Computing Community Consortium (CCC)–most recently as the Director of Research Community Initiatives–is now embarking on an exciting new opportunity with The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy In her new role, Dr. Schwartz will act as the inaugural Program Manager for the Pilot Office of the National Strategic Computing Reserve (NSCR). As described in the blueprint report of the National Science and Technology Council, the NSCR is envisioned as a coalition of resource providers that can be called up in times of urgent national needs to provide critical cyberinfrastructure capabilities and services to […]

CCC Council Members David Jensen (University of Massachusetts Amherst), Brian LaMacchia (Farcaster Consulting Group, LLC), Ufuk Topcu (University of Texas Austin), and Pamela Wisniewski (Vanderbilt University), wrote a white paper titled “Algorithmic Robustness,” that has just been published on the CCC Website. The group was part of the Socio-technical Resilience Task Force in 2022-23. Computational systems are pervasive throughout every sector of society, and the authors emphasize the need for such systems to be robust. Robustness is the “sustained performance of a computational system in the face of change in the nature of the environment in which that system operates or in the task that the system is meant to […]

During the 10th Heidelberg Laureate Forum last week, I had the opportunity to interview several of the laureates to hear their perspectives on current and future challenges in computing. Two of these laureates that I was fortunate enough to sit down with were Dr. Avi Wigderson and Dr. Yael Tauman Kalai (short bios are at the end of this blog).   With access to two leading experts in cryptography, I asked them both about the new era of cryptography we are entering, post-quantum cryptography (PQC).    RSA encryption, the most commonly used form of encryption today, was invented in 1977 by Ron Rivet, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adleman at MIT. […]