Give feedback on their research ideas and the ways in which they present them in their proposals. Encourage them to attend the CRA Career Mentoring Workshop run for senior graduate students, post-docs, and assistant professors for advice on writing proposals and other professional development activities.

6. Learn the basics of the federal budget process. Please see my first Communications blog entry (http:// cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm/20487) on this topic. Make sure to attend any CRA Snowbird session on government affairs. You should learn the vocabulary and what steps happen when.

7. Lead your faculty in building collaborations. Connect the faculty within your department to other departments on campus, to other universities, to industry, to private foundations, and to your local and regional school districts. Computing is transforming every aspect of our lives, so leverage the strengths of your faculty and your institution to build new interdisciplinary partnerships and new research and education collaborations. As a department head, you can spearhead a new large-scale research and/or education effort for your campus, e.g., on the scale of a CISE Expedition, an Engineering Research Center, or an NSF Science and Technology Center.

8. encourage undergraduates to do research in computing. Make sure your faculty always request supplements to support undergraduate researchers and/or consider submitting proposals to host Research Experiences for Undergraduates Sites.

9. encourage seniors and first-year graduate students to apply for an NsF Graduate research Fellowship. Students indicating their intent to pursue graduate studies in computing are underrepresented in this program.

10. encourage faculty to serve as reviewers for NsF. Serving on a panel can especially be an eye-opening learning experience for junior faculty. Remind your faculty that the PI community and peer review community are one and the same. Service matters.

11. encourage mid-career and senior faculty to serve as “rotators” to NsF.

CISE is always looking for good PDs and Division Directors. The quality of PDs shapes the frontiers of our field. Here is

“We need to consider
how we combine
our disparate
technical skills
to attack large-scale
problems in
a holistic way,”
Daniel Reed writes.
“this is the beauty
and universality
of our field.”

the logic: The PD chooses the reviewers and the PD makes the funding recommendations. Clearly good judgment is required for both. In the end what is funded and what is not partly determine where our field moves and what our field looks like.

12.encourage bold, creative, and visionary thinking. NSF first and foremost looks to fund good people and good ideas.

a. NSF is all about fundamental, long-term research. It is all about high-quality research identified through the merit-review process. Regardless of your perception of NSF, we welcome groundbreaking, high-risk, high-return and potentially transformative ideas.

b. NSF supports not just curiosity-driven, but use-inspired research (“ Pasteur’s Quadrant”). Computing research is naturally use-inspired. In tackling societal grand challenges (e.g., energy, environment, health care, and security), we will need both fundamental advances in computing and working with others in other disciplines. Opportunities abound!

 

Daniel Reed’s “consilience: the Path to innovation” http://cacm.acm.org/blogs/ blog-cacm/51326

As a universal intel-
lectual amplifier, computing is the
quintessential enabler of 21st century
discovery and innovation. Much of
computing’s power accrues from its
broad applicability and relevance; its
definitions are at least as varied as the
talents and interests of its practitio-
ners, in varying proportions spanning
mathematics, science, technology, en-
gineering, policy, the humanities and
the arts. I would not presume to define
computing more precisely for to do so
would inevitably omit something im-
portant and would unnecessarily con-
strain its scope.

Jeannette M. Wing is a professor at carnegie mellon university and the assistant director for computer and information science and engineering at nsf. Daniel Reed is vice president of technology strategy & Policy and the eXtreme computing group at microsoft.