Session 4: 3:05 PM – 4:05 PM
Building and Managing a Strong Research Group
Location: Golden West Conference Room
Panel: Nancy Amato (Texas A&M), Elizabeth Belding-Royer (UC Santa Barbara), Tracy Camp (Colorado School of Mines), Violet Syrotiuk (Arizona State University)
This panel is aimed at assistant professors who are one or more years into a tenure track position. The main goal of the panel is to provide assistant professors with strategies for building a strong research group. We focus on strategies for building and managing a research group, which provides an essential foundation for success in a research career, and increases impact and visibility of a research program. Two pressing tasks for junior faculty in building their research group are getting and managing research funding, and advising students. The panelists will share their strategies for building a strong research program and a cohesive, productive research group.
Succeeding In Industry Jobs: Straight Talk about the First Five Years
Location: San Diego Conference Room
Panel: Hilary Pike (Microsoft), Alexis Battle (Google), Diane Curtis (Microsoft), Michelle Lunn (Dolby Digital Cinema)
Transitioning from an academic environment to a position in industry can be a daunting life experience. As women who have recently experienced this transition, the members of our panel are well-positioned to discuss our experiences transitioning from academic programs to leading technical institutions. Women working at IBM, Google, Microsoft and Dolby will discuss the challenges they faced and the set of tools they used to address them to expose the audience to the current industry environment. Their status as recent graduates allows them to communicate their experiences from the viewpoint of ambitious young women.
Topics covered will include: mentoring, networking, balancing home and work, career advancement. Panelists will also discuss how they have dealt with challenges differently such as flexible work arrangements, building credibility at work, negotiating a two career household, and finding the right fit at work.
Split Session
Location: Royal Palm 4, 5 & 6
-
Dasher: Information-Efficient Text Entry
Presenter: Hanna Wallach, University of Cambridge
Dasher is an information-efficient text entry system, driven by continuous pointing gestures. Keyboards, despite their ubiquity, are inefficient for two reasons: they do not exploit the predictability of normal language and they waste the fine analogue capabilities of the user’s muscles. Dasher is intended to rectify both these inefficiencies. An adaptive language model of the sort also used in speech recognition, handwriting recognition, and text compression plays an integral role in Dasher, offering helpful predictions to the user without constraining the range of words.
-
Information Access for Diverse User Populations
Presenter: Vicki Hanson, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center
How can designers make applications that are flexible enough to accommodate individual differences, and differences that may change from session to session and even within a session? This presentation will focus on the issue of design flexibility. Guidelines for the development of accessible Web pages exist, both from international standards committees as well as by governments around the world. While important, these guidelines do not fully address the variability of user needs. Flexibility of design and Web application will be discussed.
Invited Technical Speaker: Trish Millines Dziko
Closing the Achievement Gap: Tools for 21st Century Learning
Location: Sunset
Presenter: Trish Millines Dziko, Technology Access Foundation
The education crisis in America is deep concern of businesses, higher education professionals. Businesses complain about the dearth of talent, educators complain about students not being ready for college, and researchers spend ridiculous amounts of time and resources trying to isolate the problems. And that’s just concerning the middle class and wealthy students.
As we start to delve into the issues concerning economically challenged students of color-often termed the achievement gap-you get various responses ranging from denial of the issues, to the defeatist attitude. Or more commonly the deer in headlights look.
There are plenty examples of excellence and best practices in education-the fact is they’re found in places where there are a lot of resources-which leads us to believe that the “achievement gap” is really an “opportunity gap”. So what happens when you get all the best practices under one roof in a school traditionally populated by low income, minority students?
The Technology Access Foundation (TAF) has 10 years of experience successfully teaching low income children of color about math, technology, and science. These are the same kids everyone says can’t learn. There is an untapped wealth of bright children of color just thirsting for knowledge and a chance to be somebody.
Trish Millines Dziko, TAF’s cofounder and Executive Director will walk you through a unique education model called TAF Academy. The TAF Academy is a 6th-12th grade school model with a mission to prepare every student for college and for life through a rigorous and relevant STEM focused curriculum that enlists students as active participants in their education and cultivates a keen awareness of their important role within the world.
The TAF Academy model is specifically designed to be implemented in public schools and is the center of a learning environment where students can continuously learn to transfer academic skills and information learned in school to real-world situations that affect their communities and lives.
Leadership: A Diverse Perspective
Location: Sunrise
Moderator: Valerie Taylor (Texas A&M University)
Panel:Naseem Bhatti (Computer Training Centre, Pakistan), Deborah Cooper (IEEE-CS), Ann Gates (University of Texas in El Paso), Elaine Weyuker (AT&T)
This panel will focus on senior women in industry, academia, and government labs. The panel will consist of three women, one from each area, to allow ample time for each woman to initially describe her career path to leadership. The goal of this panel is to address the following issues:
- The art of execution or getting the job done.
- Budget management, which is a major issue for leaders.
- Understanding and navigating the political environments
