ACM-W Connections – July 2018

Welcome from the ACM-W Chair

The projects of ACM-W have reduced activity during the months of June, July and August. This gives us an opportunity to reflect on the accomplishments of the past year, which have been many. Here are just a few of the highlights:

Twenty-two Celebrations were attended by over 5800 attendees in fifteen countries.
The creation of 33 new student chapters and 7 new professional chapters (including the first three within the US) brings the total number of ACM-W chapters to 233.
Generous support from Google, Oracle and Microsoft Research allowed 33 students to attend technical conferences through the ACM-W Scholarship program.
ACM and ACM-W became partners in the project A Global Approach to the Gender Gap in Mathematical, Computing, and Natural Sciences: How to Measure It, How to Reduce It (https://icsugendergapinscience.org/ ).

ACM-W thanks Microsoft!

Microsoft has been a steadfast supporter of the Celebrations project for many years. Recently, ACM-W received a donation of $77,000 from Microsoft that will provide funding of $3000 to each of the 2018-2019 Celebrations. We are grateful for this generous support.

Reminder: Participate in the Global Survey project

It is important that the Computer Science community have a strong representation in the global survey portion of the Gender Gap project. The goal is to collect responses from 45,000 scientists worldwide. Participation is not limited by gender and all undergraduate students, graduate students and professionals who have worked in computing are encouraged to respond. The survey will take approximately 15 minutes of your time to complete and can be accessed in one of seven languages, by visiting http://statisticalresearchcenter.org/global18. Please encourage your colleagues and peers to do the same.

Other ACM-W News

This newsletter also includes the following from our project committees:

The Celebrations project reports on PHICWiC, the first event to be held in the Philadelphia, PA, USA area.
The deadline for submissions to participate in womENcourage 2018 is only days away. See the ACM-W Europe report for submission details.

The members of the ACM-W Council will be taking a well-deserved break for the next several weeks. The next edition of Connections will be distributed in September.

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

Jodi Tims
ACM-W Chair

News from ACM-W Celebrations

The first ACMW PHICWIC (Philadelphia Celebration of Women in Computing) was a huge success, with over 200 registrants participating in a two-day celebration held at the University of Pennsylvania in April. The majority of participants were students from the PA/NJ/DE region, but we were also fortunate to host a large group of CAPWICers from VA & DC. The celebration began on a Friday afternoon with our first keynote given by Susan Davidson, Weiss Professor of Computer Science at the University of Pennsylvania. Davidson gave a fantastic talk concluding with her advice that “The key to happiness is to love what you do and to love who you are with!” Friday evening’s other events included a career fair and birds of a feather sessions.

Saturday morning started out strong with a wonderful morning keynote given by Ellen Voorhees from the National Institute of Standards and Technology who not only presented her work in the field of information retrieval, explaining why language is so very difficult, but also introduced us to the NIST League of SI Superheroes including Ms. Ampere and Dr. Kelvin! Saturday’s program was jam packed full of an assortment of workshops, technical talks, panels, student talks and posters, along with extras like resume reviews and a fun puzzle & game session.

The celebration closed with an amazing final keynote given by Mary Allen Wilkes, an early computer programmer and logic designer who wanted to become a lawyer, but went into computers because the field was more open to women. Wilkes described her work in the 1960s with the LINC computer, considered by many the first “personal computer” since for a time she worked from home, having set up the 6 foot by 2 foot LINC in her parents’ living room! Many thanks to our terrific sponsors and committee for making PHICWIC a great success!

If you are considering organizing a Celebration in the coming year (July 2018 – June 2019), please indicate your intent using the Celebration Registration Form. We provide funding and guidance for a successful Celebration! Please contact the Chair of the Celebrations Committee, Wendy Powley for more information (wendy@cs.queensu.ca).

News from ACM-W Europe

ACM-W Europe Celebration of Women in Computing: womENcourage Hackathon 2018 – 3 October 2018

What problem can you solve with your coding skills? What about that app you always wanted to develop? We are kick-starting the womENcourage 2018 conference with a one-day-long hackathon, where you can use your coding skills to bring your ideas to life.

We are now seeking project proposals related to design and development (e.g. a mobile app, website or a hardware prototype) in areas of your interest or social problems (e.g. poverty, democracy) that you wish to solve using latest technologies (e.g. Blockchain, IoT, machine learning).

Please use this form to propose your ideas by 20th July 2018: https://goo.gl/forms/TPMBDvnOSmyAapZk1.

During the event, participants will be supported by mentors from Belgrade Institute of Technology.

If you would like to participate as a mentor or become a sponsor for the hackathon, or have any project proposal related questions, please feel free to contact dorota@ecs.soton.ac.uk.

Information for supporters:

We are starting the womENcourage 2018 conference with a one-day long hackathon, where approximately 200 young women from different parts of Europe will get together to work on tech projects. We invite academic and industrial partners to participate and support us in the event in the following ways:

Supporters – You could provide swag for all participants (e.g. stickers) and prizes for the winners. Supporters will be advertised on the womENcourage website and all marketing materials. Supporters will also be eligible to receive contact information of all participants who have agreed for their details to be shared. See the supporters webpage.
Project Leaders – During the event, industry and community representatives can lead participant teams working on pre-defined projects. The project details can be defined by the project leader. It could either be a contribution to a well-established open-source initiative or new project from scratch. You can decide a problem for the teams and help them design and code the solution. The participants can select projects at the time of conference registration.
Technical Mentors – You can provide programming support to the participants and solve their coding related problems faced during the project execution.

We look forward to you support and help us in this endeavour by dropping an email at acm_w_europe_hackathon@acm.org by the 20th July 2018.