My recent service for five years as the Assistant Director of the US National Science Foundation leading the Directorate of Computer and Information Science and Engineering has afforded me a broad view of computing research and education. The field of computing is in the midst of another “golden age” and is also at another nexus point – a point of change – where future research directions, and new ways in which research will be done, are coming into focus. In this talk we will discuss these current and future CS research topics and trends, placing them in the context of the longer-term evolution of our field. We will also discuss computer science education (at several levels), as well as the forces that promise to disrupt not just computer science education, but higher education more broadly.

Jim Kurose is a Distinguished University Professor in the College of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he has been on the faculty since receiving his PhD in computer science from Columbia University. He received a BA in physics from Wesleyan University. He has held a number of visiting scientist positions in the US and abroad, including IBM Research, INRIA and the Sorbonne University. He is proud to have mentored and taught an amazing group of students, and to have received a number of awards for his research, teaching and service, including the IEEE Infocom Award, the ACM SIGCOMM Lifetime Achievement Award, the ACM Sigcomm Test of Time Award, and the IEEE Computer Society Taylor Booth Education Medal. With Keith Ross, he is the co-author of the best-selling textbook, Computer Networking: a Top Down Approach, now in its 7th edition. He is a Fellow of the ACM and the IEEE.

From January 2015 to September 2019, Jim was on leave, serving as Assistant Director at the US National Science Foundation, where he led the Directorate of Computer and Information Science and Engineering. While at NSF, he also served as co-chair of the Networking and Information Technology Research and Development Subcommittee of the National Science and Technology Council Committee on Technology, facilitating the coordination of networking and information technology research and development efforts across Federal agencies. In 2018, Jim also served as the Assistant Director for Artificial Intelligence in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.