Continued Increase in Undergraduate CS Degree Production;

Slight Rise in Doctoral Production

By Stuart Zweben and Betsy Bizot

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NSF Leads Federal Big Data Initiative

By Farnam Jahanian and Suzi Iacono

On March 29, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) launched a federal Big Data Research and Development Initiative (BDRDI). By improving our ability to extract knowledge and insights from large and complex collections of digital data, this initiative promises to solve some of the Nation’s most pressing challenges—in science, education, government, medicine, commerce and national security—laying the foundations for U.S. competitiveness for many decades to come.

Across the U.S. government today, agencies recognize that research and education communities are undergoing a profound transformation with the use of large-scale, diverse, and high-resolution data sets that allow for data-intensive decision-making at a level never before imagined. This initiative will both help to accelerate discovery and innovation, as well as support their transition into practice to benefit society. As the recent President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) 2010 review of the Networking Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) program notes, the pipeline of data to knowledge to action has tremendous potential in transforming all areas of national priority.¹

The cornerstone of this initiative is a joint NSF-NIH solicitation, Core Technologies and Techniques for Advancing Big Data Science & Engineering, or Big Data. It aims to advance the core scientific and technological means of managing, analyzing, visualizing, and extracting useful information from large, diverse, distributed and heterogeneous data sets. Specifically, the program will focus on foundational research in three areas:

1. Data collection and management: Novel approaches and new tools are required to deal with massive amounts of often heterogeneous and complex data coming from multiple sources—such as those generated by observational systems in various sciences, simulations, and models across many scientific fields, as well as those created in transactional and longitudinal data systems in social and commercial domains.
2. Data Analytics: Significant impacts will result from advances in analysis, simulation, modeling, visualization, and interpretation to facilitate discovery of phenomena, to realize causality of events, to enable prediction and to recommend action.
3. E-science collaboration environments: To allow for broad communities of scientists, engineers, and analysts to have access to diverse data and the best inferential and visualization tools, a comprehensive “big data” cyberinfrastructure is necessary.

The Big Data program creates enormous opportunities for creating new knowledge from large-scale data across all disciplines. It is one component in NSF’s long-term strategy to address national big data challenges, which include advances in foundational techniques and technologies to derive knowledge from data;  cyberinfrastructure to manage, curate and serve data to science and engineering research and education communities; new approaches to education and workforce development; and a comprehensive program to support multi-disciplinary teams and communities to make advances in the complex grand challenge science and engineering problems of a computation- and data-intensive world.

The formulation of this initiative is the result of a thriving ecosystem that includes the research community, the private sector, and the science agencies in the federal government. The computing community significantly contributed to this initiative through a number of influential white papers, many of which are included in the series Data Analytics: From Data to Knowledge to Action, posted on the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) website.² This series highlights the importance of advances in big data to areas of national priority, including healthcare, new biology, science and engineering, cyber and national security, new transportation, education, and the smart grid. Several overview papers point out the challenges and opportunities as well as the path from inchoate data to discovery made possible through new methods and approaches.

Over a year ago, under the auspices of the National Science and Technology Council, OSTP chartered an interagency Big Data Senior Steering Group to develop a research, education, and infrastructure agenda as well as a plan for how the agencies can cooperate to achieve our Nation’s long-term goals. The Big Data committee is co-chaired by NSF and NIH, with members from DARPA, DOD OSD, DHS, DOE-Science, HHS, NARA, NASA, NIST, NOAA, NSA, and USGS. The interagency initiative announced last week is the culmination of the first year of a multi-year effort.

To summarize, the Big Data initiative aims to accelerate the progress of scientific discovery and innovation through advances in deriving knowledge from data; develop the next generation of big data scientists, engineers, and educators; facilitate scalable data infrastructure; and promote economic growth and improved health and quality of life.

We invite you to participate in this exciting new opportunity for the CISE community!

Farnam Jahanian is Assistant Director for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) at NSF. Suzi Iacono is Senior Science Advisor for CISE.

Notes:

[1] See Designing a Digital Future: Federally Funded Research and Development in Networking and Information Technology, Executive Office of the President, December 2010: http://www.nitrd.gov/pcast-2010/report/nitrd-program/pcast-nitrd-report-2010.pdf].

2 See the Computing Community Consortium White Papers website: http://www.cra.org/ccc/whitepapers.php.

CRA Election Results and Board Changes

By CRA

CRA recently elected five new members to its Board of Directors. They will begin three-year terms on July 1, 2012.

Corinna Cortes is the founder and head of Google Research, NY. She has spoken at numerous events organized by Women in CS, Women in Machine Learning, and IEEE Women in Engineering (since 2003). She twice hosted a STEM program at Google, NY, Technovation challenge involving 50 high school girls over 10 evenings learning to program Android apps and competing against other teams from across the country (2011 and 2012). She was an NSF Panel Member in Information Technology and Datamining (2003-05). Cortes holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Rochester, NY. Her research work is well known in particular for the algorithms for support vector machines (SVMs) for which she, jointly with Vladimir Vapnik, received the 2008 Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award.

Jeanne Ferrante is Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, Associate Dean of Engineering and Associate Vice Chancellor of Faculty Equity at the Jacobs School of Engineering at UC San Diego. She is a Fellow of IEEE (2005) and ACM (1996). Since 2003 she has been involved in a number of CRA-W activities. At UCSD Ferrante co-founded Teams in Engineering Service, an academic program that pairs multidisciplinary teams of students with non-profits to solve their technical problems. Created in 2004, the program now has nearly 500 student enrollments per year. Her research interests include transforming computer programs to make better use of parallelism and memory; and increasing understanding of how academic careers unfold over time in ways that may affect career outcomes for under-represented faculty in science and engineering disciplines. Ferrante is a PhD graduate of MIT in Mathematics.

Lance Fortnow is Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Northwestern University. As of July 1, he will become Chair of the School of Computer Science at Georgia Tech. He is an ACM Fellow (2007); NSF Presidential Faculty Fellow (1992-98); and was a Fulbright Scholar in the Netherlands in 1996-97. Fortnow is a member of the Computing Community Consortium Council (2010-present); co-chaired the Selection Committee for CI Fellows in 2011; and currently chairs the CCC Visioning Committee. He chairs ACM SIGACT (2009-12) and the Local Academic Advisory Committee of Toyota Technological Institute-Chicago (2003-present). He was Founding Editor in Chief, ACM Transactions on Computation Theory (2007-10), and served on the Executive Committee of DIMACS (2000-03). His research interests include: theoretical computer science; and computational complexity with applications to micro-economic theory. Fortnow was awarded a PhD in Applied Mathematics from MIT.

Kathryn McKinley is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft and an Endowed Professor of Computer Science at the University of Texas, Austin. A Fellow of both IEEE and ACM, she received the ACM SIGPLAN Distinguished Service Award 2011. Currently a co-chair of CRA-W, she served on its board since 2009 and has played an active role as a member. McKinley was a session panelist at the 2008 Conference at Snowbird. She was a member of the National Academies’ Study on Sustaining Growth in Computer Performance (2007-10); an Intellectual Leader for Programming Languages and Compilers, NSF CSR Future Directions Study (2010); and a committee member of DARPA’s study on Reliability in Extreme Scale Systems (2008-09). Her research interests include: compilers; virtual machines; memory management; security; reliability; architecture; measurement and benchmarking. McKinley graduated from Rice University with a PhD in computer science.

Greg Morrisett is a Professor in the School of Engineering & Applied Sciences at Harvard University where he served as Associate Dean for Computer Science & Electrical Engineering from 2007-10. He is a member of the NSF CISE Advisory Committee (2008-present), was a member of the ACM SIGPLAN Executive Committee (2007-10), and served on DARPA ISAT (2006-09). Currently Morrisett is Editor of JACM, CACM Research Highlights, Information Processor Letters, and previously was Editor of J. Functional Programming. Awards received include the Allen Newell Medal of Research Excellence (2001); Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists & Engineers (2000); National Science Foundation Career Award (1999); Alfred P. Sloan Fellow (1998); and 10-Year Best Papers for both PLDI (1996) and POPL (1998). His research interests include programming languages, compilers, type systems and type theory, formal methods, and software security. Morrisett received a PhD in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University.

Four current board members, Eric Grimson (MIT), H.V. Jagadish (University of Michigan), Margaret Martonosi (Princeton) and Sarita Adve (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign) were re-elected to three-year terms.

The terms of four board members will end June 30, 2012. Bill Aspray (University of Texas in Austin) will rotate off the board after serving the maximum three terms. Aspray previously was CRA’s Executive Director from 1996 to 2002. Completing two terms on the board is Annie Anton (currently North Carolina State University; as of July 1, Chair of the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech). Two industry/lab members, Limor Fix (Intel) and Peter Norvig (Google) were appointed to serve one-year terms in slots vacated when two members resigned. We acknowledge with thanks the contributions of all to CRA.

CRA Helps Deconstruct an iPad for Congress

By Peter Harsha

In a series of briefings dating back to last fall for Members of Congress and their staff, a set of high-profile speakers from the science community, including a Nobel Laureate, made the case for federal support of fundamental research by highlighting the role of federally supported research in the development of key technologies in Apple’s iPad, and what future benefits that support may bring.

The briefings—sponsored by CRA, in partnership with the Task Force on American Innovation, Association for Computing Machinery, American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Chemical Society, APS Physics, Materials Research Society, and Texas Instruments—examined three key enabling technologies in the popular device: the chips that power it, the sensors that allow it to know where it is and what it is looking at, and the innovative touchscreen and multi-touch gesture system. Speakers from academia, industry and government detailed the research that lead to these technologies, but also focused on where current research in those areas might lead.

“These technologies have enabled game-changing capabilities,” said Luis von Ahn, Associate Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University and the event moderator, “and without exception, they all bear the stamp of federal support for research.”

In opening the briefings, von Ahn laid out the themes each speaker would reiterate: that federal investment supports long-term research that often does not pay for 5, 10, 15 years or more—but when it does, those payoffs are spectacular; that fundamental research often pays off in unexpected ways; that university research does not supplant industry research, and vice-versa; and that the research ecosystem in the U.S. is fueled by the flow of people and ideas back and forth from universities, national labs and industry, and this robust ecosystem has made the U.S. the world leader. As a case study, he noted a 2003 National Academies review of the development of 19 billion-dollar sub-sectors of the IT economy, all of which had at some point in their evolution received federal support for early stage scientific research, moving the area forward.

The same could be said of the technologies in the iPad. Focusing on the chips in the iPad, Martin Izzard, Vice President of Research at Texas Instruments, noted the differences between the original integrated circuit developed in 1958 at Texas Instruments and Fairchild and the modern ARM processor that powers the iPad. “The chip in the iPad has the same computing power as a Cray2 supercomputer from 1985—a computer that was as big as an industrial refrigerator, cost $40 million, and ranked among the world’s fastest until the early 1990s,” he said. Izzard noted that the path from that original IC to the ARM chip—those exponential increases in complexity and decreases in size—were only possible because of an amazingly vibrant university and industry research ecosystem that pushed the technology forward. He added that even the original semiconductor work in the late 1950s owed a huge debt to early-stage physics research supported by the federal government, often by the Department of Defense, in prior decades.

Detailing some of that physics work at the briefings was William Phillips, a Nobel Laureate for his work on atomic clocks and a scientist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Phillips told the story of the global positioning system (GPS) that allows the iPad to know where it is in the world to within a few feet. The innovations that enabled GPS have their roots in early research on magnetic resonance—work that led to both magnetic resonance imaging for health uses (MRI) and on the development of super-accurate atomic clocks. The development of atomic clocks accurate to one-billionth of a second enabled GPS, a network of clocks in space that constantly beam their position and time. According to Phillips, any GPS receiver on the ground that can see four satellites can determine its position to the nearest foot, a level of accuracy that enables not only turn-by-turn directions, but accurate missile targeting, precision farming, and a whole suite of applications that can use knowledge of your current location to tailor content to your needs.

More exciting for Phillips is where the technology is headed. Current work in his lab may help enable quantum computing—a paradigm shift in computing “as different from the iPad as the iPad is different from an abacus.”

In the fall briefings, the panelists were joined by Ben Bederson, a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Maryland, who detailed the story of the development of the touchscreen and multi-touch interface that makes the iPad so revolutionary in its ease of use. Bederson noted that early research on touch-screens can be traced at least as far back as the late ‘60s and early ‘70s in work funded by the Defense Department, and then again in the ‘80s and ‘90s in work funded by the National Science Foundation. In fact, Bederson pointed out the clear transition of work performed at the University of Delaware and supported by NSF on multi-touch touchscreen technology (originally conceived to alleviate the risk of repetitive stress injuries), to a spin-off company called FingerWorks, to Apple’s purchase of the company and its use of the technology in the iPhone and iPad devices.

Von Ahn wrapped up each briefing by pointing out that the story of the iPad is just one example of how federal support for early stage research is truly an investment with a history of extraordinary payoff—in the explosion of new technologies that have touched nearly every aspect of our lives, and in economic terms, in the creation of new industries and literally millions of new jobs. He also took pains to point out to the standing-room-only crowds on both the House and Senate sides of the Hill that the iPad is not a culmination of technology—it is just a mile-marker on a continuum of innovation that is improving our quality of life, a continuum of innovation made possible by federal research. “The federally supported research of today,” he said, “will drive the innovations that will change our lives in the years and decades ahead.”

Von Ahn and the other speakers briefed nearly 70 congressional staffers in September 2011, along with a few key Members of Congress, then spoke again in March to a standing-room-only crowd of Senate staffers, as well as a small briefing with current Chair of the House Judiciary Committee (and likely next Chair of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee) Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX). The March briefing was videotaped and will be available for viewing on the website of the Task Force on American Innovation at: http://innovationtaskforce.org.

CRA Announces Awards for Service

By CRA

The CRA Board of Directors has selected Susan L. Graham, Pehong Chen Distinguished Professor Emerita at UC Berkeley, for the Computing Research Association Distinguished Service Award 2012. Graham was selected in recognition of the extraordinary contributions that she has made over more than three decades of dedicated and selfless service and leadership.Graham has served on countless departmental review committees, editorial committees, award selection committees, advisory committees, program committees, and search committees for both the NSF Assistant Directorship for CISE and the Harvard Presidency. She served on the President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC) from 1997-2003; on the Working Group of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology to assess the Federal Networking and Information Technology Research and Development Program in 2010; and has been Vice Chair of the Computing Community Consortium from 2006-present.

As a member of PITAC, in addition to providing important guidance on the “mainstream” work of the committee, Susan served as Co-Chair of the Subcommittee on Open Source Software for High-End Computing, and as Co-Chair of the Subcommittee on Learning and Education. These activities helped to establish the foundation for today’s view of computer science as an expansive discipline whose advancements are essential to all aspects of our lives.

As a member of a Working Group of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and

Technology (PCAST) to assess the Federal Networking and Information Technology Research and Development Program, Susan was instrumental in creating the outline of the report, assigning the sections, editing the member contributions into a coherent whole, writing the crucial Executive Summary, dealing with the politics of comments and revisions, and marketing the report in Washington. While many others made important contributions, the co-chair of the working group stated, “I can say with utter certainty that there would have been no PCAST report without Susan.”

A. Nico Habermann Award Winners 2012

The CRA Board of Directors has selected Lucy Sanders, CEO, National Center for Women & Information Technology; Robert Schnabel, Dean, School of Informatics, Indiana University; and Telle Whitney, CEO and President of the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology to receive the 2012 A. Nico Habermann Award.

The award is given for their joint efforts to establish and sustain NCWIT, a national resource dedicated to encouraging greater participation of women in the development of computing technology. Each of these individuals has played an essential role in NCWIT’s creation and success.

In 2003, Lucy, Bobby, and Telle had a vision of creating a national center that would bring together institutions, organizations, and individuals committed to the goal of increasing the participation of women and girls in information technology. The stakeholders of this center would span academia, industry, K-12 educators, and entrepreneurs. The center would facilitate sharing of promising practices among its members, incorporate social science research about the impact of gender in computing careers and the effectiveness of intervention strategies, and create a community of change agents challenging each other to amplify their efforts toward this goal. It would provide a forum for greater cooperation and communication among various organizations working in this space (e.g., ABI, CRA-W, MentorNet, ACM, and the Girl Scouts are all current NCWIT members).

NCWIT’s impact on the computing research community is especially evident in the activities of its Academic Alliance and Workforce Alliance. The Academic Alliance, comprised of nearly 200 colleges and universities, has focused on recruitment and retention of undergraduate and graduate women students, as well as making the overall climate within their CISE departments more supportive of women students and women faculty. The Workforce Alliance, whose members include corporations with the premier research labs, is dedicated to recruiting and advancing technical women in corporate R&D. As one professor commented, ”In a short time, Lucy, Bobby, and Telle raised the visibility of computing’s gender imbalance and distributed effective tools and practices for amplifying and quickening progress on this important issue.”

Awards for Service to CRA

Eric Grimson, CRA Board Chair, has selected Phil Bernstein, Microsoft Research, and Carla Romero, Administrative Director at the McCune Charitable Foundation in Santa Fe, as recipients of Service to CRA Awards. The Service to CRA Award recognizes outstanding service to CRA as an organization.

Phil Bernstein is recognized for his work as CRA's Treasurer; he was instrumental in putting CRA on a sound fiscal basis including working to install sound financial controls.

Carla Romero is recognized for her many years of superb service as CRA's Director of Programs, working primarily with CRA-W and CDC to create, implement and evaluate their programs.All of the awards will be presented on July 23 at the 2012 CRA Conference at Snowbird.

Computer Science at the World Economic Forum

By Stephanie Forrest

U.S. computer science and engineering was well represented at January’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland (http://www.weforum.org/). Several academic computer scientists were invited to participate in sessions known as Idea Labs, each of which was organized around a single theme and institution. Tomaso Poggio and Alex Pentland participated in a session titled “Worms, Machines and Brains with MIT”; Justine Cassell, Pradeep Khosla, Tom Mitchell and Manuela Veloso comprised a session on “Leveraging Human-Machine Collaboration with Carnegie-Mellon University”; and the author spoke in the session titled “Managing Complexity with the Santa Fe Institute.” Each 75-minute session consisted of a short introduction, usually by the university’s president, followed by (very) short talks from each presenter, and then breakout sessions following up on the talks.

Each talk was in the visual “Pecha Kucha” format — five minutes, pictures only, slides automatically change every 20 seconds — a major challenge for those of us accustomed to giving 50 minute talks with graphs, proofs, and pseudo-code. In addition to the Idea Labs, many of the scientists spoke in specialized sessions and panels on related topics. For example, Poggio was one of two speakers in a session devoted to “The Mind and the Machine”; and I was a panelist in a session on “Risks in a Hyperconnected World” focusing on cybersecurity. My remarks on ”biological models for software security” elicited questions from an immunologist, the Chief of Europol (the European Police Office), a Vice President of the European Commission, and the CEO of a large multi-national corporation. The participants in these sessions were well acquainted with the economic and legal issues surrounding cybersecurity and cyberattacks, but there was little discussion of the increasing role played by cybersecurity issues in international relations, the rise of Internet censorship, etc.

Attending the Forum was a refreshing change from academic computer science, and we all have entertaining stories of chance encounters with famous people we had never heard of, and some we had. A recent article in The New Yorker  captures the tone of the meeting nicely. Yes, the parties were awesome!

Stephanie Forrest is a professor of computer science at the University of New Mexico and, until recently, a member of the CCC Council. Stephanie attended the World Economic Forum’s 2012 Annual Meeting earlier this year and she writes about her experiences here. This contribution originally appeared on the CCC Blog on March 18, 2012 (http://www.cccblog.org/2012/03/18/computer-science-at-the-world-economic-forum/).

The National Girls Collaborative Project:

Building the Capacity of STEM Practitioners to Develop a Diverse Workforce

By Karen Peterson

 Throughout the United States, many initiatives are underway to engage youth in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). There are also a large number of organizations seeking to increase diversity and gender equity in STEM. The National Girls Collaborative Project (NGCP) occupies a unique role among these activities in that it facilitates collaboration with all stakeholders focused on increasing diversity and engagement in STEM, connects them to girl-serving STEM programs, and provides access to information and resources that enhance the impact and effectiveness of these initiatives.

The NGCP collaborative model includes in-person and online collaboration opportunities, mini-grants as an incentive for collaborative projects, and dissemination of research-based practices via an interactive Web site, Program Directory, live and archived webcasts, and in-person professional development events. Via key partners, NGCP disseminates high-quality content and resources to its extensive network. Project activities are designed to bring organizations together, facilitate connections, encourage and support collaborative projects, provide targeted professional development, and disseminate exemplary practices.

NGCP has developed Collaboratives in 36 states with the help of local convening organizations. These local Collaboratives vary in focus areas and populations served, but all have extensive networks of organizations and individuals engaged in pursuing the common goal of gender equity in STEM. Partially funded by the National Science Foundation, NGCP works to:

• Maximize access to shared resources within projects and with both public and private organizations and institutions interested in expanding girls’ participation in STEM.
• Strengthen capacity of existing and evolving projects by sharing research-based exemplary practices and program models, outcomes and products.
• Use the leverage of a network or collaboration of individual girl-serving STEM programs to create the tipping point for gender equity in STEM.  

Why it Works

 NGCP helps organizations increase their effectiveness in informing and encouraging girls to pursue STEM careers by using a distinctive model that creates a large-scale impact by combining:

• Championship by industry leaders
• Collaboration at the grassroots level
• Events and professional development opportunities
• Mini-grant funding
• Research and dissemination of exemplary practices
•  Program information about organizations engaged in promoting STEM

Champions Board

NGCP is ‘championed’ by a prestigious group of professionals invested in closing the gender gap in STEM at all levels. These professionals, who are NGCP’s Champions Board, represent companies and organizations such as Microsoft, Society of Women Engineers, Google, National Center for Women & Information Technology, National Alliance for Partnerships in Equity, Afterschool Alliance, and Association for Women in Science. Champions Board members connect NGCP on a national level to opportunities that benefit the project, spread the word about NGCP activities in their realms, and support the project within their own organizations.

Collaboration

Numerous programs and initiatives have focused on increasing gender equity in STEM fields; however, many of these programs and their staff are isolated from others doing similar work and do not benefit from the sharing of resources or exemplary practices necessary to have a large-scale impact. Additionally, programs often compete for resources and do not realize how collaboration can increase program impact. When competition is the norm, learning how to collaborate can be especially challenging. NGCP address­es these issues by bringing togeth­er girl-serving STEM organizations, K-12 and higher education, professional organizations and industry in a specific collaborative framework provide more effective opportunities for girls in STEM. NGCP strategies enable programs to share resources, providing opportunities to interact with other programs and encouraging collaboration rather than competition.

As a result of NGCP, 62 percent of respondents in a 2010 annual survey of programs registered in the NGCP program directory agreed or strongly agreed that they were more likely to share resources with another program, and 59 percent agreed or strongly agreed they were more likely to consider collaborating with another program or organization because of NGCP. In addition, 37 percent of respondents indicated that participating in the NGCP had a moderate or high impact on their level of collaboration with other programs. Seventy-seven percent of those attending a NGCP event followed up with somebody they met at the event, most commonly to discuss ideas for collaboration or share resources. Attendees specified the most valuable aspects of events as networking and meeting others in their area involved in similar work. The 2010 annual survey results indicated that those who attended at least one in-person NGCP event were significantly more likely to have higher mean levels of collaboration with other STEM-related groups, rate the impact of NGCP on their collaboration more highly, and have more knowledge and likelihood of collaborating with others.

Events and Professional Development Opportunities

Each Collaborative hosts in-person events, providing networking and professional development opportunities for participants invested in providing K-12 STEM programming for girls. NGCP Collaboratives have hosted more than 100 events across the United States serving more than 5,500 participants. Recently, new Collaboratives have been hosting information meetings to announce implementation. Since November 2011, community meetings have been held in Arizona, Colorado, Louisiana, Missouri, Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico, and North Carolina. Participants who attend NGCP professional development and collaboration events report following up with people they meet, applying what they learned to their work, and increasing their awareness of and level of collaboration with other programs. 

“My participation in Florida Girls Collaborative Project events has been tremendously beneficial. The information I’ve received is relevant and pertinent to my work goals related to STEM programming. Before working with the FGCP it was time consuming and exhausting to navigate the glut of information out there regarding STEM and girls. Because STEM is only a portion of what I do in my job, I place great value and get a huge return on the time I invest attending Florida Girls Collaborative Project events.”

            — Cari Holland, Girl Leadership Specialist, Girl Scouts-Gateway Council

Sharing Exemplary Practices

NGCP partners with a variety of organizations that provide expertise in specific content areas to disseminate exemplary practices through Collaborative events, webinars, and the NGCP website. Partner organizations include the Assessing Women and Men in Engineering (AWE) Project, the Education Development Center, Techbridge, Girl Scouts of the USA, SciGirls, and Engineer Your Life. NGCP aims to make exemplary practices accessible, building the capacity of girl-serving organizations to provide high-quality STEM opportunities to all girls. NGCP webinars are one venue for making current research accessible to a national audience. All webinars are free and open to the public and are archived on the NGCP website. Presentations have included a workshop on assessing outreach activities, incorporating role models, best practices in collaboration, and current research on effective strategies for serving girls in STEM. In March 2012, more than 100 practitioners attended a webinar entitled “Effective Tools You Can Use to Change the Image of Computing among Girls.” This webinar is archived and available on the NGCP website for 24/7 viewing.

Program Directory

A critical online collaboration tool, developed in 2002, is the Program Directory. It has been significantly improved over the past eight years based on user feedback and ongoing analysis of functionality. Projects and organizations enter basic program data into the directory, providing brief descriptions of organizational goals, population served, geographic location and contact information. NGCP Program Directory entries also include needs and resources as a catalyst for collaboration. Users search by these variables finding potential partners to meet their needs and utilize their resources, resulting in a more effective use of resources among STEM projects. There are currently more than 2,300 programs listed in the Program Directory, representing more than 5 million girls. Practitioners who access the Program Directory find partners and network with other programs through it and benefit from the opportunity to publicize their program.

Mini-Grants

NGCP Collaboratives provide mini-grants to organizations collaborating on a STEM project for girls in their region. The grants are $1,000 (or less) and serve as the catalyst for two or more organizations to work together on a project. To date, 205 mini-grants serving more than 19,000 participants have been awarded by NGCP Collaboratives. Mini-grant recipients rate their collaborations as effective, with 92 percent of respondents indicating the highest ratings of success. In 68 percent of the projects Partner organizations indicate they will continue the effort, and 72 percent of partners indicate that collaboration with their partner has extended to other activities. 

“It was an amazing experience for all girls and women. I wished that such a forum had existed for me, when I was 10 years old. The presenters provided such vast insights into the world of Aerospace. But the most important message for our girls was clearly stated as—persevere, follow your dreams, and always, move forward towards your joy.”

—Tracey Masterson, Girl Scout Leader, and Mini-grant participant

A very clear culture and philosophy has developed within NGCP. There is common interest to maximize access to scarce shared resources across any kind of organization, and share resources in order to provide STEM programming to girls in informal settings. There is an emphasis on sharing experience and building knowledge of promising practices research and the basics of assessment. There is a common goal of building critical mass in a national network that hopes to create “the tipping point” for gender equity in STEM. It is a culture of informal STEM practitioners trying to leverage resources to achieve their goals.

By creating partnerships with others that serve girls and women in STEM, organizations can generate and carry out creative solutions and strategies that maximize the benefit beyond what one project or orga­nization could accomplish alone, reducing duplication of effort and organizational isolation while at the same time, increasing efficiencies and promoting sustainability of recruit­ment and retention efforts.

NGCP has developed and tested a comprehensive program of change that uses collaboration to expand and strengthen STEM-related opportunities for girls and women. The NGCP model accomplishes this by creating a network of professionals, researchers, and practitioners, facilitating collaboration within this network, and delivering high-quality research-based professional development.

• Project Website:  www.ngcproject.org
• Facebook:  www.facebook.com/ngcproject
• Twitter:  @ngcproject
• Linked In:  www.linkedin.com/groups/National-Girls-Collaborative-Project-4344096
• Online Program Directory:  www.ngcproject.org/directory

Karen A. Peterson (kpeterson@edlabgroup.org) is Chief Executive Officer, EdLab Group & Principal Investigator, National Girls Collaborative Project (www.edlabgroup.org)  

Sidebar:

• 18,456,465 visits to the NGCP Web site in 5 years
• 2480 programs in the online NGCP Program Directory
• 19,710 participants served in 205 mini-grants completing activities
• 10,790 practitioners served through events and webinars
• 5,313,811 girls are served indirectly by NGCP by having their leaders trained in the philosophy, knowledge, and methods of NGCP