FCRC schedules for May

By Mary Jane Irwin

The second Federated Computing Research Conference (FCRC '96) will be held May 20-28 in Philadelphia. This year's conference follows the same model of the highly successful FCRC '93, in which nine constituent conferences participated.

The FCRC model is one that assembles a number of existing, specialized research conferences into a coordinated meeting held at a common time in a common place. This retains the advantages of the smaller conferences while facilitating communication among researchers in different subfields in computer science and engineering. And because of its size, FCRC '96 also will provide great visibility for the field as a whole.

The conference is sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery, the Computing Research Association, the IEEE, the National Science Foundation and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics.

FCRC '96 includes a number of venues for attendee interaction throughout the week.

Five mornings will start with a plenary talk on a topic of broad appeal to the CS&E community:

• "Information Technology is the Lever, But Where Shall We Stand?" William A. Wulf, University of Virginia.
• "Designing Your Own Multi-Threaded Processor." Burton Smith, Tera Computer.
• To be announced. Cynthia Dwork, IBM Almaden Research Center.
• "Computing is Interaction." Robin Milner, University of Cambridge.
• "The Case for Wireless Overlay Networks." Randy Katz, University of California at Berkeley.

FCRC '96 also features an evening panel on May 24 organized by CRA. "Our Precarious Future: Who Will Fund Computing Research and Why?" will be moderated by CRA Chair Dave Patterson.

Exhibits, consisting of books and education software displays and demonstrations, will be open May 22-26.

The FCRC '96 Organizing Committee is made up of the chair of each constituent conference plus general chair, Mary Jane Irwin of Pennsylvania State University; general vice chair, Steve Mahaney of Rutgers University; treasurer, Alan Berenbaum of AT&T Bell Laboratories; exhibits chair, Frank Friedman of Temple University; and Steering Committee chair, David Wise of Indiana University.

The conference's advance program, which includes the technical program for each constituent conference and registration and hotel information, is now available. The registration deadline is April 26. For more information about FCRC '96 see http://www.acm.org/conferences/fcrc.

Mary Jane Irwin is a professor of computer science and engineering at Pennsylvania State University and general chair of FCRC '96.