Dr. Nancy M. Amato
CRA-W Co-chair, Regents Professor and Unocal Professor
Texas A&M University，USAComputing Research Association (CRA) is an organization which started in1972 focused in North America, mostly in the United States. Its purpose
is to enhance innovation by joining industry, government, and academia
to strengthen research and advanced education in computing.
Themembers of the CRA include the PhD granting departments of universities
in North America. There are 200-plus universities that are members aswell as major research laboratory, for example, IBM, Google, Facebook,and national laboratories like Los Alamos National Lab, San Diego National
Lab. All of the major IT organizations are also affiliates, for example, ACM,IEEE, AAAI, and so on.
CRA has a permanent staff and is headquartered in Washington DC. It
has roles for advocating with the government in terms of computing
research to increase funding for research, and it also organizes activities
to help computer science and computer engineering departments function.
Every other year, in July, there's Snowbird Conference. It brings together
department heads for all computer science and engineering departments
in North America as well as leadership of these national laboratories.
They have 2-day meeting where they talk about things of importance tocomputing. For example, a recurrent situation for computing department
is there booming enrollments in computing majors. This has become aproblem for the departments in terms of trying to teach those majors.
CRA has board of directors. I'm on that board. There are 18 people thatare elected nationally in the country to serve on that board and they
provide guidance. We have meetings twice a year. There are four major
subcommittees of the CRA. One is Computing Community Consortium(CCC), and their role is to understand what are the major research trends
in computing and where should they be advocating. There's another one
called Center for Evaluating the Research Pipeline (CERP). This is acommittee that was started by my committee, which was started by CRAW. CERP’s goal is to provide evidence as to things related to diversity.
We're trying to understand issues and show that our programs wereeffective. CRAE stands for the CRA Committee on Education focusing onundergraduate education on the right ways to teach education incomputer science, as well as potentially think about things going down tothe K-12 area. CRA has decided to focus on research. Traditionally, CRA
have been looking at the undergraduate levels and above including
training for people beyond graduate programs.
CRA-W is the CRA Committee on the Status of Women in Computing
Research. It has been going since 1991. The goal of CRA-W is toincrease the success and participation of women in computing researchand education at all levels. Again, we have focused our programs fromthe undergraduate level up.
I am currently the co-chair together with Julia Hirschberg who is aprofessor and the department chair of computer science at Columbia

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University.
The CRA Board is elected by the department chairs ofcomputer science. Everyone on this board runs a project. One of ourcriteria is they're all very established researchers. We wanted to ensurethat people have established their credentials academically and researchwise before we give them this additional service obligation.
Our goal is to get more women into computing research. If there aren't
enough women in graduate school, we will not be able to get them to go
further on. If there are less of them in graduate school, we will have toconvince them as undergraduate that they should be interested ingraduate school. We have programs that target at the undergraduatelevel that try to get students excited about research. In graduate school,
we have programs that try to help them build community and be
successful in graduate school and retain them in graduate school. Then,
we have programs that are targeted at people that are in the early andmidcareer stages of their career.
We call them Career Workshops
because we also focus researchers that are in research labs.
I will now talk about different programs. We spend more than $2 million
a year on our programs. In order to do that, we have to raise money.
We get some of the funding from the National Science Foundation by
writing proposals. We have recently also gotten the Department ofEnergy to fund some of our programs, but we also get funding fromindustry.
One of our programs called the Grad Cohort Workshop is funded entirely
by funds raised from industry. Some of our board members’ job is just toraise funds. Everyone on the board is volunteers. Those funds arebasically spent on our programs. At the CRA National Office, we have two
full-time staff members and another half-time staff member.
One of the undergraduate programs I've been running in summer since2010 is called the Distributed Research Experiences for Undergraduates(DREU) Program. Students from all over the US or Canada apply to ourprogram and so do professors who are willing to host a student forsummer undergraduate research experience in their lab. It's a 10-weekexperience similar to other summer undergraduate research programs.
We pay the student $7000, or $700 a week, which is intended to givethem some compensation, as well as to pay for their housing. We also
fund their relocation travel, because we try to send them to a university
that's not their home university to give them a different experience and tohelp them distinguish themselves for graduate school applications by
having a letter of reference from a professor who is not from homeinstitution.
CERP is Center for Evaluating the Research Pipeline. Our undergraduate
research programs are essentially about twice as effective as other
undergraduate research programs in having our students go on tograduate school. The reason is because our mentors are interested inbeing mentors. We needed to establish CERP to get information. We
have a project called Data Buddies where we survey computer science
departments in the country that are willing to do this. We are able toPage 2 of 6then compare results for the students in our program versus students who
have participated in other undergraduate research programs to see theirintentions after graduating. This is often difficult when you are trying tocompare effectiveness of your program. Before we had Data Buddies
project, we were only able to survey our own participants through pre-and
post-survey type analysis. Now, we are able to compare the effects of ourprograms versus students who had either another kind of program or
didn't have any at all.
We also have an academic-year program called Collaborative ResearchExperience for Undergraduates (CREU).
Students come together in ateam together with a professor at their own institution and they apply forthis program. They write a mini research proposal, and they participate inthat research experience throughout the academic year. Each student
gets on $1500 a semester, and if they participate in the summer they get$4000. However, we are trying to discourage this program and encourage
students to participate in the DREU Program instead in the summer.
One that we started recently is a virtual undergraduate town hall event.
About once a month, we have a faculty member or a researcher who willtalk about the research and they also have a mentoring topic. It's avirtual thing, and we are working together with ACM and they advertise
this through the ACM-W chapters. We have just finished one year of this.
It's a good way to make our programs available to students without
having them to travel, and US NSF is funding this program.
Programs for graduate students include the discipline-specific workshops
and distinguished lecture series. The discipline-specific workshops are
typically held together with technical conference. The organizers apply to
us to have this. It's held the day before the technical conference begins,
and it's intended to help students get to network with other people thatwill be at the conference so that they can have a better experience at theconference. We also try to get some of the leading researchers in thefield to give a talk so that the students get opportunity to meet them.
Then, when they go to the conference, the students do not have anisolating experience. Maybe they get a primer on some of the technicalmaterials, especially if it's their first experience at that conference.
In the distinguished lecture series, we provide speakers, both academic
researchers as well as researchers at national labs, to go to an institution.
We provide speakers for many of the regional celebrations through thisprogram. The speakers will talk about their research, and we also have agraduate school information panel. Our speakers are going to be womenand underrepresented minorities so that they get to see these role models
who are talking to them about research as well as going on to graduate
school.
I have been a director of that program in the past. It's hard to evaluate
the effectiveness of that program because it's a one-off lecture event, but
in our last grant when we were putting in our renewal to NSF, we wereplanning to drop that program because we couldn’t’ evaluate it well.

Page 3 of 6However, the NSF made us add it back. NSF argued that it’s not
expensive and we are getting role models for people.
Grad Cohort is an event that is 1-1/2 day workshop for graduate womenstudents. We usually hold it in April. We have been running it now for
about 10 years. This is addressing the fact that there may be not too
many women graduate students at any one institution, but if we bringthem all together, they can have this networking experience. Last year,
we had 550 students. This is a program that is funded almost entirely byindustry. Until 2 years ago, NSF didn't provide any funding. Last year, it
cost about $750,000 to run this program, $650,000 were raised fromindustry. The industry is interested in this because they are interested inemployees. If they provide certain level of support, they will get thosebenefits. Additionally, we also give the industry an access to a resumedatabase including all the students that have applied and that didn't get
selected to come. Some of our platinum sponsors have found this to be
useful in recruiting for them. Microsoft and Google in particular have beeninterested in this.
We sponsor some awards. There's this Borg Early Career Award (BECA)
given to a woman who early in her career has made significant researchcontributions, has had a positive and significant impact in advancing
women in computing research community, and is relatively early in thecareer The researchers that win this award can elect to have the award
presented at their research conference.
We also coordinate scholarships for this program called SWSIS; it's for
women studying information security. This is funded by Hewlett-Packard(HP) and also an association called ACSA. We coordinate the review
process and applications. We give out $100,000 in scholarships for thateach year. It's awarded to undergraduates or students with Masters
Degree and is interested in research. The rationale for not awarding it toPhD students is that they're already being funded for their research.
Our career-mentoring workshops are for early career and midcareer
women. The early career would be very senior graduate students likestudents who are going to go on to job market the same year and also
people in the first 5 years of their career. Midcareer are for people whoare at the associate professor level but not yet at the full professor level.
We have tracks for women who are in research university, in teachingfocused university, and in research labs. These workshops are about 11/2 day long, and they were so effective that the men wanted to have aworkshop like that for them.
Now, the CRA every other year run one that's for everyone, and on theother year, we run one focused on women. The reason I got involved inCRA-W is because as a graduate student I went to one of these workshops.
The workshops cover things that are helping you become effective in yourcareer that are useful for everyone and then there's a panel on work-lifebalance. We also run mini versions of those workshops as well as panels
focused on undergraduates at two conferences that are held in the US

Page 4 of 6each year, the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing and theTapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing.
One of our problems with the Grace Hopper Conference is it has become agigantic job fair. We don't want students who would be potentiallyinterested in graduate school to be sucked off into the job market. We
have started a new program at Grace Hopper, which we call the Grace
Hopper Conference Research Scholars. There, we help them navigate theconference by signaling out to them some of the research-focusedpresentations, and we also have an event for them at the beginning andtowards the end where we get them together and get them to meet our
research members. Based on last year’s experience, we will continue
doing that.
CRA-W had its 25th anniversary last summer. That means 25 years ago,
there was a problem we needed to help women succeed in computing
research and we still need to. Hopefully, it won't be around in another 25
years so on.
Q&A/Comments Session
Q1: How do mentors find time to volunteer in the program? Is there any
mechanism to let them work?
Nancy Amato
That's definitely true. One of the things we've managed to do with CRA-W
is it's viewed as very prestigious to be on this board. For me, it’s atremendous honor that I'm the co-chair. The other thing is it's fun to beon this board. The steering committee meets twice a year, and the board
meeting meets once a year. I have worked with many different groups
such as IEEE Robotics and Automation Society, but this one is a lot more
fun. Why our programs are effective is the people involved have apassion for it, and we care about the students and it shows with ourresults. You need to find the right people to run these activities. It canbecome tiring. We did have someone we had to ask to leave the board
because she wasn't able to fulfill her responsibilities. She became a vicepresident for research at an institution. So, we are careful about who isinvolved.
Q2: I see that CRA-W is successful in offering workshop and lectures forfemale students and someone early in career, because of very passionate
members who are waiting to become mentors or organize programs.
Another reason I thought CRA-W is successful is corporate sponsorship.
Platinum sponsor need to pay $125,000. Usually, it means corporations
see some opportunities for recruiting excellent young researchers. That's
why Grace Hopper became gigantic job fair. Don't you feel the sametendency in those events?
Nancy Amato
Yes, definitely. Even the $5000 bronze sponsor can come and provide asmall number of people to come to the event and interact with thestudents and they get access to the applicants. Academic departments

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can also sponsor grad cohort. We also provide them a list of applicants.
The students who have participated in the undergraduate program if they
are interested in going on to graduate school, the departments areinterested in recruiting those students. When the graduates of ourprogram are graduating with a PhD, if they're interested in going to anacademic, the academic institutions are interested in knowing about that.
That's one of the reasons they're interested in sponsoring our program
and that's certainly the reason why Microsoft is sponsoring it at a $100K
for a long time for this program. Hopefully, some of them are also doing
it just for the right reason, that we need to improve the field. That's why
NSF support us.

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