CMU School of Computer Science Workshop Inspires Young Women from the USA and Beyond to Explore Research in Computing
by Mary Widom, Women@SCS Administrator, Carnegie Mellon University
Opportunities for Undergraduate Research in Computer Science (OurCS) is a three-day, hands-on, research workshop for undergraduate women. The second OurCS workshop will take place March 4-6, 2011, at Carnegie Mellon University.
OurCS is presented by Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science and Women@SCS. Women from Israel, Denmark, England, Canada, and Qatar will join women from across the United States at OurCS 2011 in Pittsburgh. Throughout the workshop, they will work in teams to solve real research questions in various areas of computer science. The teams are led by faculty researchers from Carnegie Mellon and researchers from industry. At the end of the workshop, each team will present their results.
Keynote speakers at OurCS 2011 include 2009 Turing Award winner, Barbara Liskov and 2006 Turing Award winner, Frances Allen; Interim Department Head of Mathematical and Computer Sciences at the Colorado winner, Frances Allen; Interim Department Head of Mathematical and Computer Sciences at the Colorado
School of Mines, Tracy Camp; and CMU Computer Science Department Head, Jeannette Wing.
Dr Carol Frieze, Director of Carnegie MellonÕs Women@SCS, and her team of OurCS organizers, extended this invitation to undergraduate women in CS everywhere: “Come, explore, and learn what computer science research is about!” Undergraduate women in both CS and math seek this type of research experience and responded eagerly.
Registration opened at the start of November, and already 80 participants filled the workshop, and registration is closed. Students who grew up exploring computers, as well as those newly interested in CS, signed up. With such an enthusiastic response to OurCS 2011, Carnegie Mellon hopes to offer many more OurCS workshops in the future.
The first OurCS workshop (October 2007), sponsored by Microsoft Research, also attracted international participants from Denmark, India and Qatar, as well as women from the United States. Three 2007 attendees, Sunayana, Iris, and Sarah, are now back in Pittsburgh pursuing graduate degrees in the School of Computer Science at CMU, and helping to plan the second OurCS workshop! Sunayana Sitaram was born in the western Indian city of Ahmedabad and grew up using computers: “My father had access to some of the first computers available in India and to the Internet in the 80s…[so] I had exposure to computers since age 3…”. In 2007, eager to meet Turing award-winning scientist Fran Allen, and excited about an opportunity to present her speech and language research, Sunayana travelled the 7,700 miles from Surat to Pittsburgh.
“My favorite part was the research workshops – I had never done research in a group before. It was amazing to see different people with different skills all coming together to make contributions to the research problem. The conference was even better than I expected, and I had very high expectations!”
This fall Sunayana retraced those 7,700 miles to return to Pittsburgh as a graduate student in the Language Technologies Institute of the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon. “OurCS definitely convinced me that grad school is something I wanted to do. It also convinced me that CMU was the place I wanted to come to for it!”
Iris Howley and Sarah Loos also selected Carnegie Mellon for graduate study after attending OurCS.
Iris grew up outside of Philadelphia and attended Drexel University as an undergraduate. As president of Drexel’s Women in Computing Society (WiCS), she felt a responsibility to the other women in the organization. She wanted to lead a group of her fellow undergraduates to CMU so that they could all broaden their research abilities.
“Our undergraduate co-op program generally exposed our students to industry experiences, but I thought it might be worthwhile for our WiCS members to get some research exposure as well.”
The affordability of the OurCS workshop allowed her organization to send ten participants to the 2007 workshop, and “It fulfilled our desire for a conference that introduced our members to other females in the same area, while opening them up to opportunities that they may not have otherwise considered.”
Iris remarks that she was “already pretty intent on applying to a PhD program before I attended OurCS… OurCS was simply another opportunity, reinforcing the great reputation, environment, and resources available at Carnegie Mellon.”
Sarah attended OurCS in 2007 so that she could present the research she did in an REU (Research Experience for Undergraduates) the summer before. “The workshop gave me a chance to present my research in a very encouraging environment. I got lots of great feedback, which was invaluable when I presented the same material for the ACM Student Research Competition.”
Another aspect of the workshop which had a profound impact on Sarah was the opportunity to meet other women interested in computer science research. “Even though I had done research before, working in a group of seven female scientists was a wonderful experience of seven female scientists was a wonderful experience which is unique to this workshop. It made me realize just how important it is to recruit and retain female researchers in our field.”
OurCS is sponsored by Microsoft Research and a number of CMU entities: Carnegie Mellon Qatar, the School of Computer Science, the Microsoft ResearchCarnegie Mellon Center for Computational Thinking, the Human-Computer Interaction Institute, the Machine Learning Department, the Institute for Software Research, the Lane Center for Computational Biology, the Robotics Institute and Women@SCS.