STEM shoutout

STEM Shoutout: Dr. Melanie Moses

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Computer science professor elected to national computing council 

 

Professor of computer science and biology Dr. Melanie Moses was recently elected as a council member of the Computing Community Consortium (CCC).

 

Moses was elected in July of 2020 and will serve as a member for three years. According to the CCC website, the organization is dedicated to catalyzing and empowering the U.S. computing research community to pursue audacious, high-impact research. 

 

“It was an honor to be asked to join the CCC. Several of the current members are leaders whom I deeply respect and admire. It’s a pleasure and a privilege to be a part of this group,” Moses said.

 

Moses says she was attracted to the opportunity with hopes of participating in CCC efforts to inform U.S. leadership about important issues in computing.

 

“The CCC catalyzes and amplifies research that the computing research community thinks is important,” Moses said. “There are so many issues in computing that are  fundamentally important to society — questions about bias in algorithms, the role of AI in society, and the need to expand and diversify computer science education to provide equal opportunity for all to shape and benefit from transformative computing technologies.” 

 

According to their website, the CCC mission of the consortium is to catalyze the computing research community and enable the pursuit of innovative, high-impact research. It serves to strengthen the research community and align those visions with national and global challenges. As a council member, Moses says she plans to further this mission by bringing more voices of diversity to the table. 

 

“Many of the challenges we face in computing research require input from experts in other disciplines. I plan to leverage my long history of interdisciplinary collaboration to help bring a diversity of voices — both demographic diversity and disciplinary diversity — to help shape how we think about computing in society,” Moses said.

 

Along with this, Moses recently had four exciting NSF grants funded or recommended for funding. These projects include modeling COVID-19, planning AI research institutes, and developing autonomous robots for monitoring volcano emissions.

 

“I hope these new research projects will help to advance the frontiers of AI and computer modeling to tackle some of the pressing problems facing society today,” Moses said.