Welcome from the ACM-W Chair

Welcome to the second edition of our new ACM-W Connections! This month I want to mostly use my spot to address the two questions: who should join ACM-W and why? But before I do that, I have just a few quick announcements!

I’m very happy to announce that ArabWIC (Arab Women in Computing) is now affiliating with ACM-W, and their annual conference in May will be an ACM-W Celebration of Women in Computing.

In additional conference news, ACM-W is a sponsor of the first Women in Cybersecurity (WiCyS, http://www.csc.tntech.edu/wicys/) conference, being held April 11-12. Interest is so high that the organizers have had to find more hotel rooms!

Who should join ACM-W and why?

What does someone have to do to join ACM-W? It’s really quite simple. When joining ACM or doing a membership renewal, there’s a box to check for ACM-W. Everyone who checks that box goes onto our ACM-W distribution list and gets counted as part of ACM-W.

So who should join, who should check that box on their ACM membership? In our view, everyone who cares about women in computing should join ACM-W. We welcome all ACM members, women and men, who are interested in helping us support, celebrate, and advocate for women in computing. We all have work to do in order to achieve a “level playing field”, so that the path into computing for girls and women is as smooth as (or at least no bumpier than) the path for boys and men.

Of course, someone might say “Gee, another women in computing organization? Don’t we have plenty of those?” ACM-W works closely with our sister organizations, but each serves a slightly different purpose and reaches a different audience. ACM-W has the distinction of being the only organization that is based on individual membership. Through student and professional chapters, small-scale celebrations of women in computing, student scholarships to attend research conferences, and the Athena Lecturer Award, we carry out our mission internationally. Through ACM-W Connections and social media we promote news about women in computing, doing our part to insure that women’s contributions to computing are recognized and publicized. We believe that, through this combination of efforts, through the support of our more than 20,000 ACM-W members, we are helping to create an environment in which women’s contributions to computing are recognized and women in the field can thrive. I hope you will keep active your membership in ACM-W and encourage your computing friends and colleagues to also “check the box” when they join ACM or renew their membership. We welcome your participation in our celebrations, your contributions of news about the accomplishments of women in computing, your role as mentor, program committee chair, and all opportunities you seize to support women in computing.

Finally, feel like a monthly newsletter isn’t enough? We can’t give you ACM-W news more often than that, but if you want more news about women in computing and STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math), Like our Facebook page for pointers to 5-7 new stories each week, gleaned from around the Web, https://www.facebook.com/women.acm.org. Thanks for your support.

- Valerie Barr, ACM-W Chair

News From ACM Chapters

Our ACM-W Connections note last month brought us several new ACM-W Chapters Facebook group members and we are now more than 200 strong! If you have not joined the group (https://www.facebook.com/groups/201119703378118/), please send a request (to [email protected]), because the group is private!   Also, please visit our ACM-W booth at SIGCSE 2014 (http://sigcse2014.sigcse.org/): We have ACM-W Chapters ribbons for your badges and ACM-W materials to hand out. Hope to see you in Atlanta!

News From Our Contributors

Ask Judy Judy Olson, the 2011 ACM-W’s Athena Lecturer, gvies you her best advice about the ever-present issue of time management. How do you get so much done? This is the second of a special two part series in the Ask Judy column. Read it here.

News from ACM-W India

Talks by Women IT Professionals ACM-W India is organizing a series of talks by women experts at Chennai. This programme is being jointly organized with Madras Management Association (MMA), an affiliate association of the All India Management Association (AIMA). The intended audience would comprise company executives, professionals, administrators, consultants and students.

The joint programme was inaugurated on Friday, 20th December 2013 at Hotel Deccan Plaza, Chennai. The first talk on “Managing IT Services” was delivered by Ms Vijayalakshmi Shankar and Ms Venkata Vaijayanthi of Steria India, Chennai. The talk gave an overview of IT Service Management and covered the various models of service management contracts, customer view point and broad expectations.
The second talk was delivered by Ms.Rashmi Mohan, Senior Engineering Manager, Yahoo, Bangalore on 24th January 2014. The talk was on “Understanding User Engagement - Smart Phones to Wide Screens" . The focus of the talk was on maintaining the attention span of users and how to measure the parts of the website that users were most interested in.

The next talk is likely to be scheduled in April 2014. Details will be posted on the ACM_W India website.

ACM-W India Celebration The next ACM_W India celebration event will be in September 2014 at Goa. The activities being planned include technical talks, tutorials and panel discussions. For more details, please check the ACM_W India website http://india.acm.org/.

ACM India Annual Event The ACM India Annual Event was held on Friday, Feb 14. An exciting line-up of speakers included Radia Perlman, Dave Patterson, Shafi Goldwasser and other eminent speakers. More information is available at the ACM India website e http://india.acm.org/.

Announcements

  • Applications for the 2nd annual Heidelberg Laureate Forum (HLF) are being accepted through February 28th. The HLF is an annual gathering of Abel, Fields and Turing Laureates in Heidelberg, Germany. Young researchers (undergraduate, graduate, or post-doc) in the field of mathematics or computer science are invited to apply. http://www.heidelberg-laureate-forum.org/call-for-application/.
  • Registrations open for the ACM India Annual Event being held in February 2014. The ACM-W event is scheduled on Friday, Feb 14. An exciting line-up of speakers which includes Radia Perlman, Dave Patterson, Shafi Goldwasser and other eminent speakers. More details are available at ACM India website http://india.acm.org/
  • Upcoming conferences:
    • CCWiC, the first Caribbean Celebration of Women in Computing, Feb. 26-27, 2014
  • Upcoming deadlines:
    • scholarship application, Apr. 15. 2014
  • 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 here.