Computing Innovation Fellows 2020 Project

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The current coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic is disrupting aspects of daily life and work, including having a serious impact on the current faculty-recruiting season in the computing-research community. A Computing Research Association (CRA) survey completed on April 1st 2020 counted about 100 academic-computing job positions being pulled from the market due to hiring freezes, and universities continue to forecast major financial losses for the upcoming academic year, with likely negative impacts on the academic-computing job market for the next year as well. Thus what is needed is a bridge that keeps highly trained researchers in the academic pipeline to preserve future computing innovation and to meet the training needs of future computing professionals, as these will be the backbone of the future economy. CRA and its Computing Community Consortium (CCC) provided such a bridge for the severe economic downturn a decade ago, using NSF funding to administer three cohorts of Computing Innovation Fellows (CIFellows). That postdoctoral project kept 127 young scholars in research with career-enhancing programs. The current project, CIFellows 2020, is intended to provide similar support for the academic-computing pipeline in light of the damage it is sustaining in the wake of the current pandemic. The CIFellows 2020 project takes inspiration from the original CIFellows project but adapts it to the current uncertain situation, by incorporating more flexibility, allowing the option of doing a postdoc at the applicant’s current institution, and providing a significant mentoring/cohort-building component that is based on best practices that emerged from the original effort. Fellows may come from any research area under the umbrella of NSF Computing and Information Science and Engineering (CISE). Fellows will engage in a 1-2 year postdoctoral experience that furthers their career development in new ways. An application process will be implemented, and selection of successful applicants will be made using a technical program-committee style with strict adherence to conflicts of interest and based on a holistic evaluation of merit and diversity along many dimensions, with major emphasis on intellectual merit and broader impacts in applicant materials.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.