CRA Board Members Elected AAAS Fellows

A current and several former CRA Board members have been elected as Fellows to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Section on Information, Computing, and Communication this month. A ceremony honoring them will be held in February 2008 at the AAAS Annual Meeting in Boston. Fellows are elected by their peers for their contributions to science and technology. A full list of the Fellows can be found here.
Current CRA Board member Andrew A. Chien, vice president of Intelís Corporate Technology Group and director of Intel research, is also a fellow of the ACM and the IEEE. He was formerly a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Former Board members, John L. King, David A. Patterson, and Stuart Feldman, were also elected AAAS Fellows. John is the Vice Provost for Academic Information and a professor at the University of Michigan as well as a fellow of the Association for Information Systems. He is formerly a Fulbright Distinguished Chair. Dave is the E.H. and M.E. Pardee Chair of Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley and is a fellow of the ACM and IEEE. He also received the CRA Distinguished Service Award. Stu is currently the Vice President, Engineering, East Coast at Google, a position he took recently after his time as Vice President of Computer Science at IBM Research. He is a fellow of the ACM and IEEE and is currently the president of ACM.
Congratulations Andrew, John, Dave, and Stu!
AAAS Section on Information, Computing, and Communication Fellows
Werner Braun, University of Texas Medical Branch ï C. Sidney Burrus, Rice University ï Jin-Yi Cai, University of Wisconsin-Madison ï Andrew A. Chien, Intel Corporation ï Tom Dietterich, Oregon State University ï Stuart I. Feldman, IBM Corporation ï Jean-Luc Gaudiot, University of California, Irvine ï Michael T. Goodrich, University of California, Irvine ï David Harel, Weizmann Institute of Science ï John L. King, University of Michigan ï David J. Lilja, University of Minnesota ï Maja J. Mataric¥, University of Southern California ï David A. Patterson, University of California, Berkeley ï David M. Rocke, University of California, Davis ï John R. Rumble, Information International Associates ï David E. Shaw, D. E. Shaw and Co., Inc. ï James J. Thomas, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory ï Fei-Yue Wang, Chinese Academy of Sciences ï Jeannette Wing, Carnegie Mellon University

 

Two recent Information Week articles are of interest. The first article discusses the Commission on Professionals in Science and Technology’s newly released report regarding the IT workforce and the need to increase the representation of women and minorities to keep America competitive. This was a theme at the recent conferences in Florida, the Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing and the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Information Technology. The report is free and available at the CPST web site but you do have to register to access it.
The second article is about the National Research Council report encouraging open exchange of science and technology research on the international stage. The article states the Council’s understanding that there are matters of national security that the United States is trying to protect by classifying research but that “the possibility that the United States might lose its edge in technology and research represents one of the greatest risks to national security.” Again the report is available online and is worth reading.

 

Tapia Conference Coverage

Coverage from the Tapia Conference (previous post)…
Former CRA board member John King kicked off the second day of the Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing with a diversity focused plenary emphasizing the evolution of cultural context. Using historical examples Dr. King focused on the changes of the last 200 years in the US that show the progression of society in accepting and celebrating the differences between the majority and the minority groups. He emphasized that the context changes the point of view and different points of view provide more information. That is why diversity is so important.
This echoes strongly the plenary given yesterday afternoon by Norman Johnson of Referentia Systems. His talk discussed the importance of mass knowledge and that the knowledge of large groups is often more accurate than the knowledge of issue area experts. Without diversity, that mass knowledge is, in effect, “dumbed-down.”
A panel discussing why computing departments fail to retain underrepresented students if universities care about diversity noted the need for role models and emphasis on getting underrepresented students through the first year by building community and accepting cultural differences.
More to come…