ACM-W Celebrations
All India Celebrations of Women in computing conference at Goa University on 26th September.
Dr Satish Shetye, Vice-Chancellor, Goa University inaugurated the All India Celebrations of Women in Computing 2014 conference organized by ACM-Goa in association with ACM-Women India and Goa University on 26th September at 9.30 am at the conference hall of the Goa University.
ACM-W aims to support, celebrate and advocate full engagement of women in computing across the globe. It facilitates women’s academic and professional journey in the field of computing through mentoring or role modeling and works with the ACM community of computer scientists, educators, employers and policy makers to improve working and learning environments for women.
This event is ACM-W Goa’s first ever Regional Celebration of Women in Computing. This one-day celebration had several intellectually enriching opportunities for women students and professionals in the field of computing. It brought together a unique opportunity of collective learning, interacting with world class researchers and peers and discussing the work-in progress research to an enlightened audience and getting their valuable insights.
Caption: Dr Silvia Giordano (ACM Distinguished Speaker from Switzerland), Dr. Srinivas Padmanabhuni, (President, ACM-India), Dr. Sheila Anand (Chair, ACM-W India), and Mr Chandrashekhar Sahasrabudhe (Persistent Systems, Pune) graced the occasion at the inaugural ceremony.
Dr Silvia Giordano who is an ACM Distinguished Speaker and professor and head of the University of Applied Science, Switzerland delivered a keynote address on Mobile Hoc Networking: Cutting edge Directions. This was followed by a Tutorial on Visualization by Jaya Sreevalsan Nair, International Institute of Information Technology – Bangalore (IIIT-Bangalore). Rashmi Mohan,of Yahoo! Labs talked about ‘What does my machine learn about me?’.
Dr Arati Dixit, Savitribai Phule (Pune) University spoke on the “Life and Work of Shafi Goldwasser”. This was followed by Work in Progress Presentations by a eminent group of researchers.
Dr. Nutan Limaye, IIT Bombay enthralled the audience with her lively talk on “Theoretically speaking: The Why and How of Efficient Computation”.
Shailaja Sardessai, Directorate of Education, Goa moderated the Panel discussion on Career- “Break Ke Baad?” featuring panelists such as Silvia Giordano (ACM DSP), Sheila Anand (ACM-W India Chair), Geetha Kannan (Head, Anita Borg Institute), Suji Gopalan (Oracle Academy) and Pallavi Desai (Persistent HR) who provided their valuable insights on how women can keep abreast of technologies, continue networking, and overcome hurdles in getting back to work after a break in their career.
The chief guest at the closing ceremony, Prof. Vijayendra P Kamat, Registrar, Goa University, presented the prizes to the winners of the first Lady Ada National Programming Contest for girl students that were held as part of this conference. The Lady Ada National Programming Contest was sponsored by Oracle Academy and held in collaboration with ACM India and ReliScore.
The conference was sponsored by Microsoft Research, Oracle Academy, Google, Persistent Systems, Directorate of Information Technology, Goa Goverment, and Goa Tourism Development Corporation, and ACM-W.
An organizing committee under the chairmanship of Dr V V Kamat, Head, Dept of Computer Science & Technology along with ACM Goa members Ramrao Wagh, Maria and Amish Choudhary, Arati Dixit, Ambuja Salgaonkar, Jyoti Pawar, Venkatesh Prabhu, Shailaja Sardessai, Girish Bharne, Sanjay Joshi, Anay Kamat and the students of the Computer Science Department of Goa University worked tirelessly to make this conference a success.
