Faculty Recruiting Support CICS

Jensen Appointed to CRA Computing Community Consortium Council 

David Jensen
David Jensen

Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences Professor David Jensen has been selected to serve on the council of the Computing Research Association's Computing Community Consortium (CCC). 

The CCC is governed by a twenty-three-person council of researchers and leaders across industry, academia, and government, dedicated to advancing the frontiers of computing research. Members of the council serve staggered three-year terms. Jensen's nomination and appointment to the council come with a citation for his expertise in machine learning and his enthusiasm for collaboration. His three-year council term began in July 2022.

CICS Professor and former Chair of the Faculty James Allan comments, "Jensen is an extremely thoughtful computer scientist, able to balance the value of technical contributions against the potential social and ethical risks...He is an expert in causal inference, machine learning, and computational social science, all of which are incredibly important for the present and future of computing." 

The CCC was established in 2006 through a cooperative agreement between the CRA and the National Science Foundation and is charged with catalyzing and empowering the national computing research community to articulate and advance significant research directions for the field. 

"The CCC is an extraordinary organization, and I'm incredibly honored to be part of it," says Jensen. "I'm looking forward to helping identify future directions for computing research, particularly in light of the remarkable developments in machine learning and AI over the past decade. As computing grows in relevance and impact, we need more groups like the CCC." 

Jensen's appointment brings the current count of CICS faculty to serve on the CCC council to three, joining former council members Distinguished Professor Andrew McCallum and Adjunct Professor Robert Sproull.

Jensen joined the computer science faculty of UMass Amherst in 1995 after serving as an analyst with the Office of Technology Assessment, an agency of the United States Congress. He is a two-time recipient of the CICS Outstanding Teaching Award, an honor given annually to a faculty member who demonstrates excellence and creativity in teaching, a positive impact on their students, and a mastery of their subject. He received his doctoral degree from Washington University in St. Louis in 1992. His research explores machine learning and data science for analyzing large social, technological, and computational systems and focuses on methods for constructing accurate causal models from observational and experimental data, with applications to social science, fraud detection, security, and systems management.