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| 2008 Grace Hopper Celebration Of Women In Computing10-1-08 To10-4-08
Poster Authors: Iris Garcia (Beltran) On the evening of Wednesday, October 1, 2008, I participated in the Technical Poster Session during the Opening Reception of the Celebration. The session consisted of approximately 70 posters that were displayed at the reception hall of the Keystone Conference Center. This session gave the authors an opportunity to discuss their posters to those interested. Throughout the two hour session, I found myself chatting with students and professionals from academia and industry who share the same passion in outreach as I do. Most were interested in finding new ideas or techniques they could bring back to their own universities or companies. On Thursday, I began the day by attending the welcome ceremony that featured the Keynote Speaker, Fran Allen. Fran Allen is well known for being the only woman to receive the A. M. Turing Award in 2006. I later had a chance to meet her in person at the Chief Technology Officers (CTO) Luncheon. That afternoon, select students were invited to a Networking Session with the CTOs where we were put into small groups and given a chance to meet and ask questions to professionals from IBM, Xerox, Symantec and more. Then, later that day, I attended the Birds Of a Feather Session featuring a panel of professors from universities such as New Mexico State University, UT at El Paso, Winona State University, and Bowling Green State University. The topic was, “Recruiting High-School Women into Computer Science,” in which they each talked about their programs and experiences in outreach at their perspective schools. Students from the audience even participated in their own experiences in CS and outreach. Throughout Thursday and Friday, I also attended different sessions that talked about networking, outreach, and graduate school. Despite the trouble I had suppressing the elevation sickness I had, I wanted to attend as many sessions I could to learn as much as I could. One session I really enjoyed was, “Multi-Robot Intelligence” by Professor Manuela M. Veloso from Carnegie Mellon University. The delightful presentation put the spotlight on different autonomous, humanoid robots that Professor Veloso and her team had programmed to play soccer. In order to achieve this, the robots had to be able to assess their environment, communicate, and work together to make decisions and execute them through observation and feedback from their teammates. Her presentation included videos of her soccer-star robots in action, and it was amazing to see how seemingly perfect the robots were at executing plays. Another interesting forum was the Birds of Feather session held Friday evening, “Setting up an Effective Organization to Support Girls.” This forum served as an update on the MAGIC program that was initiated at the Grace Hopper Celebration in 2007. MAGIC is a mentoring program to benefit middle school and high school kids. They discussed the basic building blocks of this program, and some of the challenges they had come across in the last year. Even though this past year has been a challenge for the MAGIC team, they have received a great deal of positive feedback from parents and teachers who are eager to let their children and students to possibly participate in the program. Another beneficial factor about the conference was the number of companies and recruiters present. They had booths set up along the main corridor of the Conference Center, and I tried my best to find the time to stop at most of them. Some of the companies in attendance were Sun Microsystems, Cisco, Apple, Bloomberg, Yahoo, Microsoft, IBM, HP, Google, and Symantec. Most of whom I had a chance to talk to. Each company had a different approach to those who came to wander to their tables. While mostly everyone offered goodies (such as pens, pads, chapstick, etc.) bearing their companies logo, some came with their own gimmicks. For example, Yahoo held several raffle drawings to win “Code like a Girl” T-shirts, while Bloomberg asked you to code on the spot to win a rubix cube. All in all, attending the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing was inspiring! I learned a lot about so many different things such as networking, benefits of grad school, managing your career, and so much more. I think every student should have at least one opportunity to attend a conference like the Grace Hopper Celebration to help them expand their horizons during and after their college experience. |
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