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Department of Computer Science professor and chair of the Computing Community Consortium Liz Bradley is an organizer and panel moderator for the prestigious .

Thirty years ago, Congress recognized the importance of advancing federal investment in High-Performance Computing (HPC) and established a mechanism by which the Federal Government could maximize and coordinate its HPC research and development (R&D) investments.

The  has expanded in scope and evolved over the years into the NITRD program with 25 Federal agencies. In fiscal year 2022, Federal agencies are investing approximately $7.8 billion in NITRD activities. 

The NITRD 30th-Anniversary Symposium will bring together leading experts from the government, academic, and private sectors to both mark NITRD’s past accomplishments and look to the future. The full-day agenda includes speakers and panels in areas such as artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML), networking and security, privacy, the internet of things (IoT), and computing at scale. As a group, they will present the latest advances and discuss where research is headed.

The Symposium has been organized by the , in collaboration with NITRD .

Professor Bradley will be a panel moderator for at 2:15 PM (ET) with panelists Yolanda Gil, Chad Jenkins, Talitha Washington, and Patti Ordonez. Advances in artificial intelligence and robotics have transformed all of science and engineering and nearly every sector of our economy. This panel will characterize seminal federally-funded advances over the last three decades leading to today’s AI/robotics revolution, along with the challenges of fairness and trustworthiness that society faces in the years ahead.

Professor Bradley's research interests include nonlinear dynamics and nonlinear time-series analysis. She has mentored more than 90 graduate, undergraduate, and high-school students and half a dozen postdocs. She is a member of the external faculty of the Santa Fe Institute and the recipient of a National Young Investigator award, Packard and Radcliffe Fellowships, and the University of Colorado system’s highest teaching award.

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Two local high school students, Charlotte Gorgemans and April Tong, have been volunteering regularly for over two years in the , an intersection of the Department of Computer Science and the BioFrontiers Institute at the University of Colorado Boulder. 

Led by Orit Peleg, an assistant professor in computer science, the team seeks to understand the behavior of disordered living systems, including and fireflies, by merging tools from physics, biology, engineering and computer science. 

The students' work with the lab has led them to submit projects to several science fairs to great success, and has benefited the lab's research through their involvement and curiosity. 

A Collaborative Process

is a PhD student co-advised by Peleg and Elizabeth Bradley. She also serves as a mentor for community volunteers. 

"She's a remarkable young scientist — driven, perceptive, smart, broadly trained and a deep thinker. Her character is reflected in her mentoring and dedication to training the next generation of scientists," Peleg said. 

Fard sees the research process as a collaborative one between the researchers and the hives.

"There is a feedback loop between researchers at one end and then these living organisms at the other end. We really owe a lot of our lives and our food to these small creatures," she said. 

This spirit of mutual give and take is also apparent in the lab's inclusion of community researchers. 

Experimental Curiosity 

Charlotte Gorgemans, who just graduated from Boulder High School, decided to connect with BioFrontiers two years ago. She was fascinated by the work they were doing and wanted to understand what a path to research at the undergraduate and graduate level would look like. 

"I am very grateful for the guidance I received, as this mentorship from CU helped me find my path in computer science," Gorgemans said.

She started attending lab meetings regularly and asked questions she gathered from the lab's experiments. 

Gorgemans is always curious and active, asking great questions and trying to learn more, Fard said. With Fard's mentorship, she began to focus on how food is shared in a colony. 

Bees need to share food, but if the food is unhealthy, there is research that suggests the hive will take steps to reduce the number of other bees they interact with. Fard saw that Gorgemans was interested in how models could be used to explain the experimental data she was seeing. 

For her experiment – titled Modeling and Analysis of the Impact of Unhealthy Food on the Honeybee Colony Health – Gorgemans won second place in the Boulder Valley School District's Regional Science Fair, in the behavioral sciences track, and received the Ralph Desch Memorial Technical Writing Award from the Colorado Science and Engineering Fair.  

In the fall, she starts her computer science degree at CU Boulder. 

Building Model Behavior

April Tong, now a Senior at Fairview High School, started her journey with BioFrontiers through CU Science Discovery, which pairs high school students with researchers. 

"I thought it was so cool that, as the lab, we could watch the bees go around and then use computer science to analyze their paths, like what turn angles they use, which normally you wouldn't think of," Tong said. 

When the program was over, she asked if there was any way she could continue volunteering, and Fard agreed to mentor her. Through her continued involvement with the lab, Tong became interested in the process of modeling itself and its applications across disciplines, including swarm robotics. 

"She started learning the agent-based programming language that we actually use, which is not easy,”  Fard said. “She started taking classes and ended up writing parts of our code for us."

Tong's experiment – titled Exploring the Clustering Function in the Western Honey Bee for Enhancing the Rate of Liquid Food Exchange and its Applications in Swarm Robotics – received third place in the BVSD Regional Science Fair and a special award from the Society for In Vitro Biology. 

Fresh Perspectives 

Fard believes in the power of community volunteers both for the lab and for the students. 

"What I really like about working with high school students is that they look at the problem with a very fresh perspective. The moment they think of something to ask, that's what I want to hear," Fard said.

Because the students are not yet subject-area experts, they can think through a question without immediately jumping to the tools or existing research. This openness can lead to a fresh question outside of the world of academia.  

Both Gorgemans and Tong were deeply grateful to Fard, Peleg and Bradley for their time and respect. They felt their involvement in the lab mattered and appreciated the skills the Peleg lab helped them acquire. 

Fard also appreciates seeing those skills building. 

"After working with these volunteers for two years, I can see the impacts of their involvement with the lab in the way they think. It's a small amount of time for the mentor, but I see a huge impact on the students."

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CU Boulder faculty member plays key role in white papers for policymakers

Every four years, the Computing Research Association’s undertakes a series of white papers for policymakers and the computing community that focuses on potential research directions, challenges and recommendations around national priorities.

This year, that effort was led by CU Boulder computer science Professor Liz Bradley, who is chairing the CCC. In July, the CCC convened a group of academic and industry representatives and began brainstorming topics that policymakers needed to be most aware of in the next four years.

The result is focused on topics like artificial intelligence, online disinformation and cybersecurity. Bradley, who has been a part of the “transition paper” process for several cycles, said it has been a gratifying way to contribute her skills and knowledge more broadly.

“I care about funding for research, but what I really care about is good policy for science and how policy can be made on solid scientific basis with good funding to support and bootstrap. So that was my goal in doing this,” she said.

In past years, the process of disseminating – or “briefing” – CCC reports and white papers in D.C. has been a whirlwind of rushed hallway meetings with congressional staffers, as well as outreach to connections in the Office of Science and Technology Policy, the Department of Defense and more.

This year, in true COVID-19 fashion, those briefings will happen virtually, which Bradley expects will allow them to have an even greater reach. CCC members have also already been providing the papers in advance to some of their personal contacts.

CU Boulder alumnus Maj. Gen. Matthew Easley (MCompSci’98, PhD’00) is one of those contacts who got a “sneak peek.” A former PhD advisee of Bradley, he is now the chief information security officer in the office of the U.S. Army’s chief information officer. He said the policy and research recommendations in the papers are helping him understand the future of cybersecurity, computing and information. 

“Each paper is a summary of important technology advancements that our country must be preparing for,” he said. “Just in cybersecurity, they point to changes in how quantum computing will affect our public key infrastructure, how the adoption of IoT device and 5G and 6G technologies will increase the number of networked devices we must manage exponentially, or how to counter AI-based information warfare attacks.“

Bradley said they’re also seeing the results of some of the “seeds” they’ve planted in previous years, as people contact them about white papers from past cycles.

“It's been a wild ride watching them go out and just land, and then all of a sudden there's a plant there,” she said. “It's like you throw the seed down and suddenly the beanstalk comes up.”

For instance, as vice chair of the CCC, she helped to develop a research roadmap for artificial intelligence that was likely a factor in the launch of the , including the AI Institute for Student-AI Teaming at CU Boulder.

“That roadmap took a year out of my life and a lot of gray hair, but it has transformed things,” Bradley said.

This year, Bradley specifically helped to author two of the papers, “” and “,” and edited a number of the others. While she said they’ve already gotten a lot of interest in the papers from their sneak peeks and briefings, she’s also looking forward to seeing their impact in the future.

“The CRA, especially the CCC, has been growing this kind of ecosystem for around 15 years now,” Bradley said. “It really is kind of like gardening. You make sure that your garden soil is right, and you don't know what's going to come up, but something might come up in three years.”

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Elizabeth Bradley, a professor in the Department of Computer Science since 1993, began a term on on July 1.

The CRA is one of computing’s leading industry groups, working to unite companies, academia and government to advance computing research. Their board of directors provides leadership for the association’s standing committees and is often called upon to lead the CRA’s response to issues affecting computing research.

Bradley will chair the for 2020. This group is tasked with conducting “activities that strengthen the research community, articulate compelling research visions, and align those visions with pressing national and global challenges.”

Bradley received her bachelor’s, master’s and PhD degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1988, she competed in the summer Olympic Games in rowing. She holds appointments and affiliations with a variety of engineering departments. Her current research activities focus on nonlinear dynamics and chaos, as well as scientific computation and AI. She is a member of Eta Kappa Nu, Tau Beta Pi and Sigma Xi, as well as the recipient of a National Young Investigator award, a Packard Fellowship and a 1999 College of Engineering and Applied Science teaching award.

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