In collaboration with the PLDI organizing commitee, the CCC is happy to announce the winners of the FIT session:

1) Outfoxing the Mammoths, by Marek Olszewski and Saman Amarasinghe, Massachusetts Institute of Technology;

2) Resource-Based Programming in Plaid, by Jonathan Aldrich, Carnegie Mellon University; and

3) Dualities in Programming Languages, by Martin Hirzel and Priya Nagpurkar.

These three were selected based on an online poll of registered participants of PLDI. Olszewski, Aldrich, and Hirzel will each receive travel grants. Their presentations and papers can be found on the FIT Web page.

Many thanks to the PLDI community! And please check out the presentations and comment about them below.

(Contributed by Frans Kaashoek, Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

The Principles course comes in response to the observation that the current offerings at most high schools are not appealing to many students.  These courses are either on computing literacy (e.g. using word processors and spreadsheets) or are traditional computer programming courses.  The former is largely vocational and the latter is perceived by many students as being dry, irrelevant, and requiring previous background.

In 2008, approximately 15,000 high school students took the AP Computer Science whereas approximately 7 times as many students took AP Statistics, 10 times as many took AP Biology, and 15 times as many took AP Calculus AB.  Perhaps not surprisingly, the number of students arriving at college and indicating an intention to major in a computing discipline is only a few percent and only 0.3% for women.

One aspect of this initiative is to add 10,000 new computer science high school teachers in 10,000 schools in the United States by 2015.

To learn more about the rationale, design, and implementation of the new course
go to www.csprinciples.org.  To participate in the online community for this initiative go to www.computingportal.org/cs10k.

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).

The Visions conference was designed to highlight research visions for the future and consisted of invited plenaries and submitted talks. The plenaries were extremely well done.  Ross Anderson spoke about the integration of social issues and computing in the design of increasingly complex systems, using numerous examples from history and economic theory. Nicolò Cesa-Bianchi explored frontiers in machine learning, Jon Kleinberg spoke about the future of social networks, and Barbara Liskov provided a very interesting retrospective on the work that lead to her Turing Award coupled with lessons from this work for the future.

The UKCRC Grand Challenges effort  has been underway since 2002; Sir Tony Hoare and Robin Milner (the conferences began with a very nice tribute to him) started the effort following Hoare’s attendance at CRA’s first grand challenges workshop. The UK effort has been considerably more structured than similar efforts in the US: there is a steering committee, a group of topics was selected, leadership committees were created, funding was obtained for activities and, over time, road maps for research in each area were developed. Status results were presented and the results have been mixed. Some areas, e.g., Dependable Systems Evolution, are seen as quite active and self-sustaining. Others, e.g., Ubiquitous Computing, seem to have faded with research still ongoing but not focused by the grand challenges effort. It is not clear whether the grand challenge model has generated any substantive additional research funding for the selected challenges.

The conference addressed the status of ongoing efforts as well as discussions about new ones including tele-health, IT & Global Climate Change and Computing for 9 Billion People. The steering committee will select which ones to advance;  finding a strong advocate will be a key selection criterion. Interestingly these more recent proposed grand challenges are definitely focused on societal problems rather than computing ones.

Both of these efforts are directly related to the activities of CCC in envisioning and promoting research futures in computing.

(Contributed by Andy Bernat, Executive Director of CRA)

Informatics Europe was created five years ago as a European version of CRA (which is a North American association by charter). A recurring theme at this meeting was the concern that the European scientific research community still does not fully appreciate computing as an intellectually vibrant research discipline in its own right; instead the field is often viewed as an enabler of research in other disciplines. A number of discussions centered on ways in which the computing community can do a better job in explaining the field to others.

Informatics Europe is working on a series of additional initiatives of value to its members. It is beginning data collection analogous to the CRA’s Taulbee Survey and there are discussions on overseeing the process of departmental evaluation. Evaluation is a major issue in Europe, where departments are regularly and systematically evaluated under national government authority. The fear among computing researchers is that the evaluation process will be defined by a non-computing body using irrelevant or inappropriate standards. Therefore, Informatics Europe hopes to develop its own evaluation process and a list of potential evaluators. There was considerable discussion of the possibility that the end result would be a European-wide ranking of departments, an outcome that is generally not favored.

Overall, it was an interesting meeting and, being held in Paris, the food was quite above the typical conference fare, including wine with lunch.  A further note – ACM chose this conference to announce the creation of ACM in Europe (http://dev.acm.org/test/europe/).

This report was contributed by Andrew Bernat, Executive Director of CRA.