Welcome from the ACM-W Chair

Welcome to the January 2015 issue of ACM-W Connections. It has been a year since we first introduced Connections and I want to once again think the wonderful volunteers who make it happen every month: Melanie Wu and Ileane O’Leary who put together each issue; Katie Siek and Sarah Loos who handle the longer research pieces; and representatives from each of our project areas who contribute updates.

I think everyone was busy celebrating holidays and the New Year, so our current issue is a bit smaller than usual, but still informative. We have updates from Europe, from Chapters and Celebrations, and research summaries from two of the students who were prize winners at the ACM Student Research Competition at the 2014 Grace Hopper Conference.

Let us know about exciting activities happening in your area that support women in computing! Best for 2015!

~Valerie Barr, ACM-W Chair

Articles of Interest

In this special issue of Research Spotlights, we highlight two of the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing 2014 ACM Student Research Competition awardees:

  • "Eve eat dust mop": Data-driven measure of Child Language Development with Simple Syntactic Templates, by Shannon Lubetich, a senior at Pomona College.
  • Using Escape Analysis to Speed Up Dynamic Race Detection, by Emma Harrington, a senior at Williams College.

Read their award winning research here .

News From ACM-W Chapters

As the new semester begins, it is time to plan ACM-W Chapter events. Here's a link to our booklet of "101 Ideas for ACM-W Chapters' [events]:"

Share your own ideas with us by posting on the Facebook page, "ACM-W Chapters." Consider working with Chapters or other Women-in-Computing groups at schools that are close to your campus. My own chapter will be collaborating with Indiana University Bloomington, where we will be attending a luncheon and program.

News from ACM-W Celebrations - A Look Ahead into the New Year

As we start of the second half of the 2014-2015 academic year, there is much to be excited about for the Celebrations project. There are eight events in the planning stages that will occur between now and May including MinneWiC (Upper Midwest), OCWiC (Ohio), CAPWiC (Northern Virginia), INWiC (Indiana), ArabWiC (Abu Dhabi), MICWiC (Michigan), CCWiC-Cuba, KYCC-WiC (Kentucky Community Colleges), and NYCWiC (New York). This is the inaugural event for both the Cuban and Arab Celebrations and we are pleased to see continued growth of the international reach of the Celebrations project. Collectively these events anticipate nearly 1000 attendees! Be sure to continue to read this newsletter as well as ACM MemberNet for monthly reports on highlighted conferences.

We are continuing to work on improvements and expanded resources for the Celebrations web site. Before the start of the 2015-2016 academic year, conference coordinators will be able to make post-Celebration reports online, including the uploading of photos. This feature will enhance our ability to showcase conferences on our web site and build an historical archive of events.

Planning for 2015-2016 events has already begun. I encourage all coordinators who are planning Celebrations for next fall or spring to email me ([email protected]) and I will be in touch soon to give you access to our web site and begin collecting information about your events.

As always, I welcome any suggestions for how we might better support the Celebrations project. Feel free to email at any time with your ideas.

News From ACM-W Europe

Papers, Workshops and Panel proposals due on Jan 25 2015.

There is still time to submit your work for womENcourage 2015 (womencourage.acm.org). There will be multiple tracks, workshops, and panels during the 2.5 day celebration of women in computing.

Check out the website and social media pages to stay up-to-date on all the details of womENcourage celebrations.

womENcourage 2015, the ACM-W Europe Celebration of Women in Computing, is supported by INRIA and Google (Diamond), Bloomberg and Cisco (Platinum), and Informatics Europe and Microsoft Research(Silver). Support is used to help students studying in Europe to attend the celebration.

Please pass this on to your friends, students, colleagues and your company and encourage them to contribute!

News From ACM-W India

The ACM/ACM-W India Annual event for the year 2015 will be held at Birla Institute of Technology Pilani, K K Birla Goa Campus, from 5–7 Feb 2015. This annual flagship event is organized to discuss trends in science and technology, and to celebrate ACM’s spirit and India’s accomplishments in computing. This event is attended by ACM Turing Award winners, ACM Office Bearers, researchers and IT professionals. The past events have witnessed keynote speeches by Tony Hoare (Turing Award 1980), Raj Reddy (Turing Award 1994), Barbara Lisskov (Turing Award 2008), Charles Thacker (Turing Award 2009), Eric Brewer (Infosys ACM Award  2009), Franz Kaashoek (Infosys ACM Award 2010) Ravi Kannan (Knuth Prize 2011), Vinton G Cerf (Turing Award 2004), Joseph Sifakis (Turing Award 2007) and Shafi Goldwasser (Turing Award 2012).

The annual event provides an opportunity for young students and professionals to listen to, interact with, and be motivated by leading men/women professionals across the world. This year the following eminent researchers have been invited for the main event on 6th Feb 2015.

  • Prof. John E. Hopcroft
  • Dr. Susan Rodger
  • Prof. Kathy Yelick

The Ninth edition of Inter-Research-Institute Student Seminar (IRISS) will be co-located with Annual Event and will be held on Feb 5th. This is a forum for research scholars from Indian academic institutes to present their work and there will be poster presentation to discuss their ongoing work.
The SIGCSE inauguration would be held on Feb 7th.

For more info and registration, please visit  our event webpage.

Announcements

Would you like to contribute an article to the ACM-W Newsletter?

With a distribution list reaching thousands of ACM-W members, contributing to the newsletter is a wonderful opportunity to share ideas and information across a wide audience. Submit a proposal for an article http://women.acm.org/submit.