Back to November 2002 CRN Table of Contents

[Published originally in the November 2002 edition of Computing Research News, Vol. 14/No. 5. p. 5.]

Following the success of the first CRA Grand Challenges Conference in Computer Science and Computer Engineering held in June 2002, the CRA board of directors voted to incorporate such conferences as an ongoing CRA activity. The board has appointed a steering committee to provide direction for future conferences.

Chaired by CRA board member David Patterson (UC Berkeley), other committee members include Randy Bryant (Carnegie Mellon), Barbara Grosz (Harvard), Mary Jane Irwin (Penn State), and Bob Sproull (Sun Microsystems).

The steering committee's mandate is to:

• Clarify the objectives of the conferences.
• Define a process for soliciting, reviewing, and accepting conference topic proposals.
• Provide policies and guidance for conference organizing committees.
• Assure appropriate evaluation of each conference.
• Provide institutional memory for Grand Challenges Conferences.

CRA's current plan is to hold a Grand Challenges Conference every other year, alternating years with the CRA Conference at Snowbird. To start this cycle, a second conference is planned for late spring/summer 2003, contingent upon funding.

Each Grand Challenges Conference will have its own organizing committee. This group will work with CRA to write the proposal for funding and to run the conference. The CRA steering committee will help conference organizers to sharpen their ideas, and will provide critical feedback and advice.

The purpose of these conferences is to provoke "out-of-the-box" thinking as a way of articulating the grand challenges in computer science and engineering in a compelling way. Information about the first Grand Challenges Conference, whose theme was systems, is posted on the CRA website at: http://www.cra.org.