North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, together with collaborating institutions Clemson University, Prairie View A&M University, the University of Colorado, the University of Wisconsin, Auburn University, the University of Indiana, Norfolk State University, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Fort Valley Sate University, and Jackson State University, proposes an extension of the successful Alliance for the Advancement of African-American Researchers in Computing (A4RC, pronounced "A-Force"). A4RC aims to increase the number of African-Americans obtaining advanced degrees in computing, particularly at the Ph.D. level. A4RC establishes and develops student pipelines from HBCUs to universities offering advanced degrees in Computing. A4RC has amassed a body of knowledge and experience with respect to what it takes to build effective HBCU/R1 faculty collaborations, develop productive HBCU/R1 research teams that include graduate and undergraduate students, and prepare undergraduate and master's students for research at the Ph.D. level. A4RC uses a "research pod" concept that is efficient, flexible, and effective in terms of HBCU/R1 research collaborations. With this extension, A4RC plans to expand the alliance to include a greater number of HBCU/R1 research collaborations, and to build new partnerships. A new category of partners -- Affiliate Partners -- will engage additional HBCUs and national labs and A4RC will become formal partners with the very effective BPC Demonstration Project, African-American Researchers in Computing Sciences (AARCS). A4RC will build collaborations with the BPC STARS and Empowering Leadership Alliances, and ADMI: The Symposium on Computing at Minority Institutions.
Our participation in the Alliance for the Advancement of African American Researchers in Computing (A4RC) centered on summer internships for undergraduate students in Computer Science from Jackson State University. The students spent ten weeks each summer visiting the Computer Science Department at the University of Colorado, Boulder, working on projects addressing the needs of people with cognitive disabilities. Student participants in prior years contributed to the development of a prototype system that uses mobile Web technology to provide naming practice for people with aphasia, a language disorder that interferes with the ability to associate words with objects. In 2011, the students worked on Simple WebAnywhere, a tool that allows users to view the mobile version of a Web site, even if they are using a desktop or laptop computer (Simple WebAnywhere extends the WebAnywhere screen reader developed by Prof. Jeff Bigham of the University of Rochester). The value of this is that the mobile versions of Web sites are typically much simpler than the versions ordinarily presented on desktop or laptop computers, as data the students gathered and analyzed show. For people for whom reading is difficult, these simpler versions of Web sites can be much easier to use. The intellectual merit of the project flows from the contributions the students made to our understanding of how computer technology can be harnessed to advantage for people with cognitive disabilities. Its broader impact comes from the engagement of undergraduate students from a historically Black university in research (African American students are very poorly represented in graduate study in Computer Science), and from the future application of the results in tools and services for people with cognitive disabilities.
