Computing Research Association

Meet the faces advocating for and shaping the future of AI education! 🤖

Continuing our series highlighting our newly announced NSF NAIRR AI Education Fellows, this week we’re celebrating Narges Norouzi! 🌟

Narges Norouzi is Associate Dean for Students in UC Berkeley’s College of Computing, Data Science, and Society and an Associate Teaching Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences. She works on human-centered machine learning, with an emphasis on AI for education and personalization. She leads interdisciplinary projects to design tools that are transparent, reliable, and effective in real learning environments. Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, Google Research, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and the California Learning Lab. Norouzi earned her PhD and MASc in computer engineering from the University of Toronto.

We’re inspired by her focus on AI for education and look forward to her advocacy as an NSF NAIRR AI Education Fellow!

⏳ The deadline is approaching: Who will you recognize?

Nominations for the 2026-2027 CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Awards are due Wednesday, October 14, at 9:00 PM ET.

If an undergraduate researcher in your academic unit stands out for their research contributions and potential, now is the time to put them forward for national recognition.

🏅 Winners receive up to $1,500 in travel support to attend a research conference of their choice, with additional outstanding nominees recognized as runners-up, finalists, and honorable mentions.

Hear from past awardees and nominators—and learn how to submit a nomination—in the September issue of Computing Research News: https://cra.org/crn/2026/09/recognize-an-outstanding-undergraduate-researcher-nominations-open-for-cras-2026-2027-awards/

What should every graduate of an undergraduate artificial intelligence (AI) program know?

The NSF LEVEL UP AI report “Designing AI Curriculum Pathways” identifies eight foundational knowledge areas institutions should consider as they develop AI degrees, minors, certificates, and other undergraduate pathways — spanning mathematical foundations and core computer science to machine learning, generative AI, ethics, applications, and professional skills.

The framework isn’t meant to prescribe eight separate courses or a single model for every institution. Instead, it provides a shared foundation that institutions can adapt to their own students, resources, and goals.

Explore the recommendations and the eight foundational knowledge areas: https://cra.org/what-should-every-graduate-of-an-undergraduate-ai-program-know/

Teaching AI and looking for an easier way to give your students access to GPU-powered computing?

Join us for a free webinar introducing Vocareum AI Notebook, a managed cloud learning platform that gives students browser-based access to preconfigured environments and controlled GPU resources without requiring instructors to provision or manage the underlying infrastructure.

Learn how to create virtual classrooms, provide GPU-enabled environments, deploy assignments, integrate with your LMS, manage computing budgets, monitor resource consumption, and use automated grading.

📅 Wednesday, October 14 | 4:00 pm ET | 3:00 pm CT | 2:00 pm MT | 1:00 pm PT
💻 Free & Virtual
🔗 Register: https://cra-org.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_hx4y0CEHTHee-R78tWMGwQ #/registration

Featuring Sanjay Srivastava, CEO, Vocareum, alongside NAIRR AI Education Fellows Brent Harrison (University of Kentucky) and Elahe Javadi (Illinois State University).

Open to U.S.-based faculty teaching undergraduate or graduate courses that incorporate AI and require GPU or other advanced computing resources. No prior experience with Vocareum or NAIRR Classroom is required.

What does it feel like to work on a research problem when the answers genuinely aren’t known yet?

For Ourania Rahman, a student at Fairleigh Dickinson University, that was one of the most exciting parts of her summer through CRA’s Distributed Research Experiences for Undergraduates (DREU) program.

Working with mentor Lei Zhang at the UMBC Department of Information Systems, Ourania explored a challenge at the intersection of post-quantum cryptography and artificial intelligence: how to more precisely identify software that relies on cryptography that could eventually become vulnerable to quantum computers.

By the end of the summer, filters she designed had improved the precision of the research team’s framework from about 72% to nearly 79% while maintaining 100% recall.

“What's exciting is realizing the answers genuinely aren't written down anywhere yet, so figuring things out means I'm actually contributing to the field, not just learning what's already known,” Ourania said.

The experience also confirmed that post-quantum cryptography and AI security are areas she wants to continue pursuing.

Read Ourania’s DREU story: https://cra.org/crn/2026/09/contributing-at-the-frontier-ourania-rahmans-dreu-experience/

The DREU program is supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF).

🌟 Help an outstanding undergraduate researcher get the recognition they deserve.

Nominations are open for the 2026-2027 CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Awards, recognizing students who show outstanding potential in computing research.
Winners receive up to $1,500 in travel support to attend a research conference of their choice, while runners-up, finalists, and honorable mentions also receive national recognition.

Think about the undergraduate researchers you’ve worked with this year. Is there someone whose contributions and potential stand out?

📅 Nominations are due Wednesday, October 14, 2026, at 9:00 PM ET.

Learn more and submit a nomination:
http://cra.org/crae/awards/cra-outstanding-undergraduate-researchers/

What will it actually take to build the capacity to teach AI across higher education?

With support from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), the NSF LEVEL UP AI initiative brought together 173 participants from more than 150 institutions and organizations to tackle some of the biggest challenges facing undergraduate AI education.

The result is a collection of seven workshop recommendation reports addressing curriculum, mathematics, faculty development, interdisciplinary AI, community colleges, institutional resources, and infrastructure.

Throughout the fall, CRA will spotlight recommendations from across the collection and explore what they mean for institutions developing and expanding AI education.

Explore all seven reports: https://cra.org/building-the-capacity-to-teach-ai-new-recommendations-for-undergraduate-ai-education/

CRA-Industry has released a comprehensive new guide titled “Bridging Industry and Academia: A Guide to Acadustrial PhD Programs,” authored by Lisa Amini, Jonathan Bell, Theo Drane, Sarah Parsons, Kelly Shaw, Rahul Simha, Heather Stephens, and Helen Wright.

The guide’s primary finding is clear: success in an Acadustrial PhD depends less on formal program structures and more on the strength and alignment of the central “tripartite relationship”—the three-way bond between the student, the academic supervisor, and the industry mentor.

Check out the key core principles of success and the full report in Computing Research News: https://cra.org/crn/2026/08/cra-i-releases-guide-to-acadustrial-phd-programs-bridging-industry-and-academia/

What do data centers cost, and what do they make possible? The Computing Community Consortium’s (CCC) next Community Chat will discuss questions like these.

On Thursday, October 8 at 3:00pm ET, join CCC for a 1-hour webinar and Q&A titled Powering the Solution: Balancing Computing’s Energy Demands with its Contributions to Sustainability. The webinar will discuss the two sides of computing's relationship with the environment: the growing energy demands of technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and high performance computing (HPC), and the role those same technologies play in solving environmental problems.

Powering the Solution will also feature short talks from Chandra Krintz (UC Santa Barbara) on applications of computing and its effects on agriculture and ecology, Ana Radovanovic (Google) on carbon-aware scheduling and how industry is navigating this balance, and Adam Wierman (Caltech) on data centers as burden or asset in the communities that host them.

These will be followed by a Q&A with the full author team of the new Communications of the ACM (CACM) opinion article "Balancing Sustainable Computing and Computing for Sustainability,” including Michela Taufer (University of Tennessee Knoxville), Elizabeth Bradley (University of Colorado Boulder), Tevfik Kosar (University at Buffalo), Siddharth Parida (Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University), Masood Parvania (The University of Utah), Eve Schooler (University of Oxford), and Bronis R. de Supinski (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory).

Register below. Can't attend? Sign up anyway and you’ll receive the recording.

Welcome! You are invited to join a webinar: Powering the Solution: Balancing Computing's Energy Demands with its Contributions to Sustainability. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email about joining the webinar. Join the authors of the CACM article "Balancing Sustainable Computing and Computing for Sustainability" for a 1-hour CCC Community Chat webinar and Q&A. Data center construction has accelerated sharply over the past few years, and with it has grown the public conversation about energy, water, and la...