It's faculty-recruiting season. For the past N-years (where N isn't small, all things considered) we're recruiting new faculty. Here's a
link to the pdf for our call and here's text pulled from the same ad posted at the CRA website (that ad expires on 2/14/10)
The Department of Computer Science at Duke University invites applications and nominations for tenure-track faculty positions at an assistant professor level, to begin August 2010. We are interested in strong candidates in all active research areas of computer science, both core and interdisciplinary areas, including algorithms, artificial intelligence, computational economics, computer architecture, computer vision, database systems, distributed systems, machine learning, networking, security, and theory.
The department is committed to increasing the diversity of its faculty, and we strongly encourage applications from women and minority candidates.
Notice that our department is "committed to increasing the diversity of its faculty", but that this diversity is defined inline as "women and minority candidates".
There's another kind of diversity, that goes beyond surface appearances. First, I'm all for judging by surface appearances, and diversity should have something to do with people
looking different --- that's really important. But, as a department we're all too happy to recruit a woman who is a whiz at mathematical approaches, understands k-armed bandit problems and whatever high-level math-and-stats-du-jour concepts are getting attention. But we have trouble looking at men or women who don't fit our perceived profile of potential excellence. Which means the candidates should look like us in terms of what kind of work they think is important and what kind of work they do. We're not diverse in accepting the possibility that a different kind of work than what we understand or appreciate could lead to great success, advancement, change, and impact.
As an example, let's look forward and backward to the work of
Luis von Ahn who was a Duke undergrad and was (according to him at least) heavily recruited by both research labs and academia when he went on the job market. His research and work to date are likely too different for him to "fit" in our department. His Google Scholar H-index is somewhere around 15. He's been out for five years and has one NSF grant. He (arguably) works in HCI. He says his research interests are
Novel techniques for utilizing the computational abilities of humans, such as games in which people collectively solve large-scale problems that computers cannot yet solve (e.g., http://www.gwap.com); human-computer interaction, artificial intelligence, and the difference in computational abilities between humans and computers (e.g., http://www.captcha.net, http://www.recaptcha.net); theoretical cryptography and security, and computer science theory in general.
But he's not really a theoretician as viewed by our theoreticians. He doesn't do machine learning even if he has published at NIPS, and he's certainly not a systems person. He's too different. Doesn't matter that hundreds of students would take courses he taught, that he's a [Macarthur|Microsoft Faculty|Sloan] fellow, that he sold his company to Google for millions, that he donated a classroom to CMU, that's he's from Guatemala. He's not viable, he doesn't fit our hackneyed perceived profile of potential excellence.
Our diversity is built on holding up a mirror to our academic selves. As we go out into the brave new world of faculty recruiting in 2010, will we take a chance on holding up a different mirror? Can we weigh a risk/reward of folks who won't succeed the same way we did/will? I hope we'll be able to embrace lots of diversity, not just what looks different, but what feels different.
