GHC News: View from the Program Chairs
Every year the Grace Hopper Celebration has grown. The 10th Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing is distinguished by an increase in technical content with four technical tracks, along with the traditional New Investigators and PhD forums Our previous “View from the Program Chairs” letter mentioned the Open Source Track ending with a Hack-for-Good session, a Human-Computer Interface (HCI) Track with a field trip to the GVU Center at Georgia Tech, and a new Technical Research Papers Track. Here we take a closer look at each of these along with the Invited Technical Talk Track.
An exciting addition this year is the Technical Research Paper track where all submissions went through a blind review process. Technical papers had previously been included with the submissions for Panels, Workshops, and Presentations. However, with the increased content the conference steering committee responded by creating this new track. The papers represent one person’s or a group’s research/area of expertise, is very specific to that area of research/expertise, and allows for in-depth discussion of that technical topic. There will be 8 talks covering a wide variety of topics including security, distributed computing, infrastructure and more. These talks are being presented by researchers from both industry and academia. This new track is complementary to the Invited Technical Speakers Track.
The Invited Technical Track features seven leading technical women who are working at the cutting edge of computing technologies. The invited speakers span a wide range of technical topic areas and institutions: Catherine Baudin from eBay Research Lab (text mining), Carla Gomes from Cornell University (computational sustainability), Susan Graham from UC Berkeley (programming language implementation), Claudia Bauzer Medeiros from University of Campinas in Brazil (managing scientific data), Lucila Ohno-Machado from UC San Diego (healthcare information technology), Jan Moolman from Association for Progressive Communications (technology to end violence against women), and Fernanda Viegas from Flowing Media (visualization as a medium). Get your seats early for these talks as they fill up quickly!
The conference steering committee is always faced with a challenge when discussion turns to special tracks. Last year, we had a great robotics track. In the past few years we have seen an increase in interest in the Open Source community. Our solution, a special, dedicated Open Source Track. OSS leaders will introduce participants to the career opportunities of Open Source Software and how to get started. Panelists from various organizations will discuss humanitarian causes targeted by Open Source Software developers. The track culminates in a Codeathon for Humanity where participants team up to build software that directly helps those in need. This track was created specifically for us by key women in the open source community.
Never wanting to our job to be easy, the steering committee also felt we had a unique opportunity to offer a Human Computer Interaction track along with an offsite laboratory tour of the GVU Center at Georgia Tech. During the tour demonstrations by Georgia Tech Faculty and students will illustrate first hand how research in human-centered computing is fostered by crossing the disciplinary boundaries in collaborations with experts in science, engineering, design, art, and the humanities. The HCI Track will include an overview the career path of a researcher and practitioner in HCI, the study of the interaction between people (users) and computers. Several technical women in HCI will share their career stories, addressing both challenges and opportunities that HCI work provides.