• Letter from ACM-W Chair
• News from ACM-W Celebrations
• News from ACM-W Scholarships
• News from ACM-W Student Chapters
• News from ACM-W Europe
• ACM India Grad Cohort Workshop for Women
• ACM-W Asia Pacific regional meeting

Welcome from the ACM-W Chair

As was announced in the April newsletter, ACM-W is undergoing an organizational restructuring that will better support our global growth and project support into the future.  Thanks to those of you who nominated for leadership positions in the newly formed ACM-W North America and the Rising Star Award Committee.  Decisions on those positions will be made soon.

Three additional leadership positions on the ACM-W strategic leadership team are next in line to be filled.  Those positions are:

• Standing Committees Chair – planning and oversight of cross-cutting projects of ACM-W including the Scholarships program and efforts to attract the next generation of computing professionals
• Communications Chair – development and oversight of ACM-W’s communication strategy including the web site, social media participation, and the monthly newsletter
• Treasurer – oversight of budgeting in collaboration with the ACM-W chair

We are now accepting (self) nominations for these three positions.  If you are interested in joining our team or know of someone who is a good fit for a leadership role, please visit the online nomination form at https://docs.google.com/forms/d/12QsyqR3_wz7JpFBkSr2Ce0jvqWH-oN9fnOL_HMBkxeQ/edit.  If you are unable to access the form for any reason, please contact me at jltims@bw.edu and I’ll be happy to assist.

Other ACM-W News

Also appearing in this month’s newsletter:

• Catherine Lang reports on the successful workshop held in Chengdu, China last month.
• The ENTER: Celebration of Women in Computing, held in Belgrade, Serbia in April, is featured in the Celebrations report.
• The Student Chapters report introduces two of the newest chapter.
• The Scholarships project invites readers to visit their newly upgraded website to read stories of scholarship awardee experiences at the conference they attended.
• AI for Good Global Summit 2019 is featured in the ACM-W Europe report.  ACM-WE chair Natasa Milic-Frayling represented ACM-W at the event.
• ACM-W India announces the second annual grad cohort workshop to be held in Delhi this July

Thanks for standing with us as we work to fulfill our mission.

Jodi Tims
ACM-W Chair

News from ACM-W Celebrations

ENTER: Celebration of Women in Computing 2019

The Third ACM-W Celebration of Women in Computing-ENTER 2019 happened on April 17th and 18th in Yugoslav Film Archive in Belgrade/Serbia attracting more than 200 students, faculty and representatives from industry.

The Celebration featured 2 days of programming. The first day was for the lectures and the second one for the workshops.  Two keynote speakers, one being Wei Lin, VP of Engineering at TeleSign addressed the audience.  The first day featured three parallel tracks with more than 20 speakers, most being female.  The tracks included Tech Track, Management Track and Career Talks.  On the final day, four workshops including Modern React Development, Clean Code in Practice, Basics of WordPress and Preparation of the CV were presented.

News from ACM-W Scholarships

The ACM Scholarship for Attendance of Research Conferences program provides support for women students in Computer Science and related programs who wish to attend research conferences. The student does not have to present a paper at the conference to be eligible for a scholarship. Applications are evaluated six times each year, to distribute awards across a range of conferences. There are usually 3-6 awards given for each group of applications. The ACM Scholarships are made possible by the generous support of Microsoft, Google and Oracle.

If the award is for attendance at one of the ACM Special Interest Group conferences (SIG conferences), the SIG will most likely provide complementary conference registration and a mentor during the conference. The number of free registrations available varies from SIG to SIG. ACM-W has helped students attend a wide range of meetings including SIGGRAPH, SIGCHI, Women in Cyber Security, ACM EC, SIGCSE, IEEE Conferences, DIS, IPDPS, ICCC, AAMAS, FLAIRS, WIMS, CSCW, GECCO, ICAPS, and ICSE, amongst others.

The scholarship exposes students to prominent researchers in their field, introduces students to new research, and excites them about doing research by themselves. We ask students to share with us some of their thoughts on the conference they attend, preferably with a picture, so that we can show our readers and funders the diversity of our winners. We never cease to find truly inspiring stories!

This month we are very  happy to report that,  after much work backstage  on the ACM-W webpages and the databases that support them, we are now able to post the “trip reports” of  our awardees online at https://women.acm.org/scholars/acm-w-scholars/?sch_year=2019.

This system is just starting, but hopefully in due course we will have all trip reports online, which is a great incentive for winners to write informative reports. But more importantly it means that we can present all the beautiful stories we receive, instead of having to choose only two or three every round.

This time around we feature one undergraduate student from Delhi, Brihi Joshi, who went to the conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM) in Melbourne, Australia; one Master student from Sweden, Roisatul Azizah, who went to CHI 2019 in Glasgow, Scotland and one PhD student from Irvine, California, Saumya Gupta who went to Tempe, Arizona for TEI – Tangible, Enbedded, and Embodied Interaction.

Their stories and pictures speak of the wonder of attending conferences and meeting their heroes, as well as forming friendships and mentorships. Congratulations to all of our winners! We hope you do enjoy being part of your chosen research communities.

The next application deadline is June 15 for conferences taking place in August—September, 2019.   For more information and to apply visit: https://women.acm.org/scholarships/.  If you have any questions, please contact the scholarship committee chair Prof. Viviana Bono, bono@di.unito.it

News from ACM-W Student Chapters

We’d like to welcome our new chapters at DIT University, Dehradun, India and Marquette University, Milwaukee, WI.

We are also happy to award Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV) our May Facebook award. Lucia Pons of the UPV chapter posted: “Last Saturday our university, Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV), hosted the senior regional final of the Technovation Challenge Valencia 2019. Our chapter was present in the event with volunteers and mentors. We had a great day supporting and cheering up the girls! Furthermore, the two teams mentored by our members obtained the bronze awards! We are looking forward to keep collaborating in this fantastic event next year! #girlpower #sheIsWhyICode”

Thanks for sharing your news and inspiring us all!

News from ACM-W Europe

womENcourage 2019 – ACM Celebration of Women in Computing

Rome, Italy  September 16-18, 2019

This year’s theme: Diversity Drives Societal Change

WomENcourage organisers are working non-stop to create a rich and enjoyable event.

Now that the poster and scholarship deadlines have passed, we are happy to announce that more than 120 submitted posters were submitted, and there are more than 140 scholarship requests.

The two multidisciplinary research tracks have signed up top speakers in two areas: “Shaping Conscious Cities” and “Artificial Intelligence and Health”.  The panels and workshops have fascinating themes such as Smart Cities, Internet of Underwater things, Women in Cybersecurity, Big data and more. Stay tuned for a very exciting program.

This year’s keynote speakers are Francesca Rossi, Sihem Amer-Yahia, Danielle (Sparky) VanDyke, and Donatella Sciuto.

Francesca Rossi – IBM AI Ethics Global Leader and Distinguished Research Staff Member at IBM Research

Her research interests focus on artificial intelligence, specifically, they include constraint reasoning, preferences, multi-agent systems, computational social choice, and collective decision making.

Sihem Amer-Yahia -Research Director at CNRS

Her interests are at the intersection of large-scale data management and social data exploration.

Danielle (Sparky) VanDyke  – Software Reliability Engineering Manager, Google

She leads teams working on the infrastructure & tooling to make Google’s mobile applications stronger, faster, and more reliable.

Donatella Sciuto – Executive Vice Rector of the Politecnico di Milano and Full Professor in Computer Science and Engineering

Her main research interests cover the methodologies for the design of embedded systems and multicore systems considering performance, power and security metrics.

Of course, all of this would not have been possible without our supporters. https://womencourage.acm.org/2019/supporters/

You can also learn current happenings about womENcourage on social media. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, or Linkedin, and search for acmwomencourage on Instagram.   Facebook 2019 Forum is also up and running for the participants of womENcourage 2019. Feel free to ask questions, introduce yourself and chat with others, make travel and accommodation plans, and most importantly meet new people and make friends before coming to the event! Click here to join.

Important Dates

Last day for early registration        15 July  2019

Ada’s Legacy celebrated at ADA University

For the 4th year in a row Azerbaijan ACM/ACM-W Chapter partners with ADA University to host the Ada’s Legacy: ACM Celebration in Baku. Over the past years Ada’s Legacy attracted participants, women and men alike, from academia, industry and government sector. Apart from celebrating the role of women in computing, it also promotes ACM’s womEncourage conference and encourages participation from Azerbaijan. Now, at least 5 delegates represent the country at the conference every year. Last October, 3 female computing students from Azerbaijan also joined young researchers from all over Europe presenting their posters in Belgrade.

This now annual celebration started back in 2016 with Reyyan Ayfer, then founding Chair of ACM-W Europe kicking off motivational speeches from leading local women in computing. The program in 2017 included the screening of BBC documentary Calculating Ada: The Countess of Computing, subtitled in Azerbaijani with the guest of honour Prof. Jennifer Widom, Dean of the Stanford School of Engineering.

This year’s celebration program was expanded to 2 days and took place on 4-5 May. Started on Star Wars Day, the event featured stickers with popular female characters that promoted coding. Day 1 included the plenary session and parallel afternoon sessions with student research presentations, workshops and movie screenings. Day 2 hackathon was a follow up to the game development workshop from the previous day. Read more about the event at https://azerbaijan.acm.org/ada-s-legacy/program/.

ACM India Grad Cohort Workshop for Women

ACM India is pleased to announce the second  ACM India Grad Cohort Workshop for women after the first successful Grad Cohort workshop for women PhD students working in computing. The main goal of this workshop is to reach out to Indian women graduate students in the field of computing. The speakers will be eminent women Computer Science researchers from the Indian academia and industry, who themselves were in the shoes of the audience of grad students, a few years to many decades back. In this evolving social context of more and more women taking up Computer Science and CS research as career, the talks, panels and interactive sessions will focus on the speakers’ personal experiences. 

Venue: Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, India
Dates:  6 – 7 July, 2019
Website: http://www.cse.iitd.ernet.in/~rijurekha/acmindiacohort2019.html

Topics of Interest: 

• More hands-on aspects of choosing PhD advisor
• Finding a research topic
• Honing reading and writing skills for literature survey in PhD
• Time management and building confidence
• One-on-one networking/discussions with senior researchers, both from industry and academia

ACM-W Asia Pacific regional meeting

At the CompEd2019 Conference held in Chengdu, China in May a pre-conference workshop was organised by Jodi Tims and facilitated by Catherine Lang, with the aim of establishing an ACM-W regional community in the Asia Pacific region to identify, grow and support Women in Computing efforts.

Representatives from six countries were present: Australia, Singapore, Malaysia, China, Japan, Indonesia and Thailand.  The two-day workshop consisted of a series of presentations and discussions, with opportunities for members to share their own experiences for encouraging women in computing in their universities, and promoting the profession in the wider community.

The attendees were also fortunate to meet both Jodi Tims and Reyyan Ayfer over the Zoom Messaging system. Reyyan joined us from Turkey and shared her experiences in setting up the ACM-Europe group as well as providing tips on how to build the team, keep in touch and celebrate together either with local or regional events. Her advice of taking ‘baby steps’ was invaluable to the group. Jodi was able to join us from the USA, providing support and encouragement to the workshop. Other presenters were Jacqueline Tate and Jenine Beekhuyzen who explained how they manage fundraising, sponsorship and outreach activities.

At the conclusion of the two-day event there was a sense of enthusiasm to explore the possibility of regional events and celebrations. The first online meeting was held this week, and plans are under way to structure and grow the group by inviting members from other Asia Pacific countries, gain visibility of the group on-line as well as agree on the location of our first event.

We are also keeping in mind Reyyan’s advice of ‘baby steps’. Thank you to Jodi and the ACM-W for initiating this excellent opportunity.

If anyone would like to join the group and help the Steering Committee please contact c.lang@latrobe.edu.au or bimlesh@nus.edu.sg.

In 2019, ACM-W scholarship winners, including undergraduate students and Ph.D. students, attended conference such as CHI in Glasgow, UK, WSDM in Melbourne, Australia, and more.

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In 2018, ACM-W scholarship winners, including undergraduate students and Ph.D. students, attended conference such as WSDM in Los Angeles, ISWC in Singapore, and more.

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