Meeting Women from Around the World – Crossing Borders

As the 3rd ACM-W Celebration of Women in Computing kicked off inLinz, Austria, the first thought that came to mind was the theme of the event: Crossing Borders.  It was evident that we were in the presence of many different cultures and people from many countries.  The diversity was obvious when looking at the geographic origins of attendees, who came from four out of five continents, from as far west as Colorado in the US, to as far south as South Africa and as far east as Russia.  Attendees also had diverse interests. Thirty-two posters were presented  demonstrating the diversity of attendees’ studies: from benchmarking of linked data, neural networks, image processing, autonomous vehicles, tools for dyslexia, the list goes on and on.  The program underscored the diversity of the event: from programming in Android, to computational music,  perception, programming languages, entrepreneurship,wrapping up with a lively panel discussion.  With this event we crossed more than just geographical borders, we also shared our technology, cultural and networking interests.

It was a day that was diverse in many ways but one: gender.  Ninety-seven percent of the audience was female, which one would think is the desired target of such an event.  However, in order to promote and impact diversity in the computer science community we need to bring men into the discussion.  Our goal in the future should be to be inclusive of individuals from all backgrounds, cultures and genders.

At 16:00 on the 12th of September the Management Zentrum at Johannes Kepler Universitat in Linz, Austria began filling up.  Students hung their posters, networked with new friends and visited with representatives from industry who came to show their support.  The career fair is a very popular event for students and faculty at the university.  Feedback from students indicates that they value the interaction with industry representatives and see it as a major opportunity. Besides networking with the other attendees, they enjoy hearing about opportunities in industry.  ACM-W Europe and the womENcourage attendees are thankful for our supporters who provided the opportunity for 50 students to attend the womENcourage 2016.

SIGPLAN,  GOOGLE, Bloomberg, Oracle, Informatics Europe,  Intel and FreeBSD

The entire program has been recorded and is available on the ACM YouTube channel.   

The day kicked off with the first keynote by Lynda Hardman from CWI in the Netherlands,  her keynote address: “From Linked Data to Stories”  conveyed to the audience the assimilation of data into a story and how data taken out of context can convey a message not intended by the speaker.  This was an interesting start of a wonderful day.  The video of the presentation can be found here.

“Android Development at Google” where  Robin Bennett, Google discussed her experience of learning programming for Android inspired the participants to learn the ins and outs of Android programming.  I heard from one of her professors at Imperial College, London that while she was studying at Imperial College London,  she shied away from programming.  Now through this talk she is encouraging women to program for Android with detailed examples and lots of enthusiasm. Her experiences of learning Android programming were inspiring and interesting.  Watch the video.

The diversity of the program was engaging.  With each presenter discussing a different topic
we were exposed to very different areas of computing.  The keynote: “Computational Music Perception”  by Gerhard Widmer from Johannes Kepler University was incredibly enlightening; first by understanding that  people play different pieces of music according to their moods and then by demonstrating the research required for computers to play in a similar manner really makes one consider the possibilities for careers and research. A talk such as this one clearly demonstrates the vast number of opportunities in the tech field.  

Programming languages are part of the core software required for computer programming. SIGPLAN is a supporter for womENcourage 2016.  In her talk  “Programming Language Research and Technical Disruption” , Susan Eisenbach of Imperial College London demonstrated how programming languages affect both financial and cybersecurity, and how programming languages can incorporate features that help us stay secure. Watch the video.

The final keynote of the day  “Cross-disciplinary Modeling” presented by Gerti Kappel, Technical University of Vienna exemplified how modeling can address the issues of distributed computing.  Learning about new areas and topics incomputing can engage our curiosity about other topics and lead us along the path of lifelong learning. Watchthe video.

Entrepreneurship can help you reach goals beyond your reach when the necessary resources are not under your control.  “Entrepreneurship: the value of teams and social capital’ presented by NatasaMilic-Frayling, University of Nottingham, detailed the steps, and resources necessary to bring an idea to market.  Networking connects you to the rest of the ecosystem, using your social capital, which is your network and their reputation.  Watch the video.

5. A Panel of Successful Computer Scientists

ACM-W Europe womENcourage 2016 wrapped up with a panel discussion on the topic  “Promoters and Prohibitors for a Career in CS” led by Dame Wendy Hall, University of Southampton, along with the panelists:

• Becky Plummer, Bloomberg LP
• Pearl Pu, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
• Toni Collis, University of Edinburgh
• Jane Richardson, Oracle Academy

Dame Wendy Hall opened the panel by asking the panelists what has helped them to get where they are today, and what are their top tips for the audience. Top tips from the panelists include:

• Continue to network. One of the most important things you can do is networking. As with the womENcourage event and its diverse topics, networking helps you look at things differently.
• Your network is your job and career, you can be working on a global job from anywhere in the world.
• Get advice on and ask someone to review your CV.   
• Listen to all the advice you are given but take only those that you really feel will be important for you.
• When you are curious about a topic, persist and acquire necessary skills.
• If you are going to have technical interviews get involved with hackathons.
• Distinguish people around you who are promoters.
• Make your own physical and mental health a priority, meditate and practice yoga.
• Don’t worry if you do not want to be perfect.
• Most of us experience “imposter syndrome”.  In order to counter this, have advocates who you trust, who reinforce to you your qualities and accomplishments.
• There is a huge demand for talent in the industry. The demand is there for you.

6. Closing thoughts for #womENcourage2016. Looking forward to #womENcourage2017

ACM-WE is thankful to the organizer, volunteers and the attendees of womENcourage 2016 to make it a success. womENcourage 2017 is planned to take place on September 6-8, 2017 at Barcelona.

An interview with ACM-W Europe Celebration of Women in Computing: womENcourage 2016 keynote speaker Prof. Gerhard Widmer 

The program committee of ACM-W Europe womENcourage 2016 announces that Gerhard Widmer, a professor at the Johannes Kepler University Linz, where he heads the Institute
for Computational Perception, will present a keynote address at the 3rd womENcourage. In addition to his work at JKU, Gerhard also founded and leads the Intelligent Music Processing and Machine Learning Group at the Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence (OFAI), Vienna. He is a Fellow of the European Association for Artificial Intelligence (EurAI),
and the recipient of an ERC Advanced Grant (2015) of the European Research Council.

His keynote address intends to give the audience a glimpse of what it means for a computer to ‘perceive’ and in some (limited) sense ‘understand’ music, and what such musically literate machines can do for us. In particular, he will show how computers can give us new insights into the complex and subtle art of music performance; how they enable us to intuitively explore large sound and music collections; and how they will provide the basis for humans to interact with music in new ways. The goal of this talk is not so much to explain the mathematical and algorithmic details of the underlying methods, but to motivate and inspire the conference participants to consider music as an exciting and rewarding and worthwhile field for computer science research.

Bev Bachmayer spoke to Gerhard about his planned presentation and his motivation for speaking.

Bev: In your opinion, why should students attend womENcourage 2016?

Gerhard: It is a great opportunity to get to know interesting and nice and like-minded persons (of either sex). You get to learn about what they do, get inspired by their ideas and enthusiasm and big and small successes. You can find out that you are not the only person in the world facing certain difficulties, and get inspiration from how others deal with these.

Bev: What do you hope the attendees will take away from your talk?

Gerhard: That computer science is an exciting field, and that there are still many open research frontiers. And that scientific research is beautiful and even fun (sometimes).

Bev: Why is womENcourage important to you?

Gerhard: Because its goals are important. The field of computer science is in dire need of creative young researchers, and we should do anything we can to encourage them to venture into this field, to connect to others, and to persevere. Actually, the word that I like best in the conference’s self-description is celebration: it’s not (only) about problems of women in computer science, it’s also about opportunities, successful role models, inspiration, and creative ideas.

Bev: Why did you choose your topic for womENcourage?

Gerhard: My goal is to encourage and motivate students to consider computer science as an exciting research field, and one that has more facets than they might have thought. And I believe the best and most convincing way to do so is to talk about things that are close to one’s heart — and that, in my case, is music, computational music research, and how it connects both scientific and technological and human questions.

It’s Confirmed: Women Love Tech!  

And the participants of ACM-W Europe womENcourage Celebration of Women in Computing deemed that the Celebration was a huge success! Over 180 participants from 28 countries attended the womENcourage Celebration which exceeded their expectations from the lively socializing during the career fair and the poster session before the opening Keynote on Friday 25th September until the ending Keynote on Saturday afternoon. The attendees participated in several interesting activities including keynote talks, panel discussions, technical paper sessions, workshops, case studies, unconference sessions, and the hackathon. See the photos taken by our photographers, Kristina Lidayova and Tomas Oravec, and view the recorded sessions.

In the opening, Virginia Grande welcomed all womENcouragers attending the celebration at the impressive main building of Uppsala University. She also thanked all of our wonderful sponsors ACM, ACM-W, and Uppsala University, and supporters: Google, Inria, Oracle, Bloomberg, Cisco, Facebook, IAR Systems, FreeBSD, Informatics Europe, Intel and Microsoft Research. As a result of their generous support, 53 students were able to attend the Celebration with travel scholarships.  Virginia did not omit to give special mention to all men in the room. The first speaker ACM President Alex Wolf welcoming everyone to womENcourage,  effectually pointed out that “We would not be here at all if there was not a problem in our community. I want to make sure that all of us understand that this is not a women’s problem! This is a community problem! And it takes everyone to solve this problem.”  

Vicki Hanson’s keynote “The Human Side of Computing”

Vicki Hanson opened womENcourage with a keynote address on her research, highlighting Inclusive Technologies. Computing has often been envisioned as a way of augmenting human abilities.    Nowhere is such a computing goal more evident than in the field of accessibility where researchers seek to create devices and software to address needs of people who through age or disability face exclusion from full societal participation.   In creating accessible technology and novel accessibility tools, research has not only facilitated digital interactions and quality of life needs for many, but also has served to advance the field of computing more generally. By talking about her career and how she advanced, she encouraged the audience to think about opportunities in computing.

Åsa Cajander’s keynote “On Grit and Being the Token Figure”

Åsa’s talk about “On Grit and Being the Token Figure” brought up many of the topics that most of the women in the audience have experienced.  Many a somber faces listened to her tell her story,  each knowingly nodding as they were reminded of similar situations they had experienced.

Many kinds of grit are needed to survive in our current environment, Asa confirmed that we are not alone when faced with such circumstances. Asa said “Change comes slowly, but it is changing, we all need to continue to encourage these changes.”  The recording for this talk is here.

Marie-Paule Cani’s keynote “Towards Expressive 3D Modeling: An example of Career in Computer Graphic”      

Through examples and videos Marie-Paule taught us why graphical design is essential for human creativity, including the fact that graphical simulation is difficult to control, and she described the new methodology which is emerging to ease the interactive design of complex shapes, objects and characters, possibly in motion.  During her summary she advised everyone to collaborate with others to succeed.  She also talked about being flexible when looking for a career.  And she emphasized that you should choose your own field,  twist your work to be what you want and to be open to opportunities. You can watch the recording here.

Red Chair  

Sitting on the red chair is symbolic. People sit on the red chair to recognize the stories’ and contributions of women in computing.

During the entire celebration, the attendees enjoyed writing their quotes and having their photos taken while sitting on the Red Chair supporting the SitwithMe campaign. Read more about the SitwithMe  website and see the pictures taken during the celebration on their website.

Panel Discussions

WomENcourage hosted three panel discussions which provided participants with substantial insight into the following interesting topics from varying perspectives:

1. Open Source as a Career Path
2. Teaching and Learning 3.0
3. Out of the Ordinary Jobs

Thanks to our fabulous panelists, attendees were given the opportunity to actively participate, ask and discuss questions during the panels.  All panels have been recorded and are available here.

Papers

Through the papers sessions, undergraduate, MSc, and PhD students were given the opportunity to present and share their current research work and their achievements with researchers and professionals who were attending the conference and receive valuable feedback by them. The womENcourage programme included 4 sessions of technical talks which aimed at sharing research ideas and discussing exciting new research directions.

The topics of the presented papers belong in the following four categories:

•         Computing to Assist Disabled Individuals or Older Adults,
•         Computation and Graphics,
•         Human-Computer Interaction, and
•         Gender issues in computing education.

All presented papers were interesting and they represented a decent range of topics in computing research. Their presentations resulted in four active paper sessions with several questions and interesting discussions following each talk.  The papers are posted on the womENcourage website here.

Unconference

 The  unconference sessions effectuated interesting discussions on one or more subjects suggested by their participants who are also actively involved in the discussions. Thus, they were organized, structured, and led by their attendees. Once the idea of the Unconference was introduced to womENcourage attendees (at the beginning of the conference), they enthusiastically reacted by suggesting interesting topics that they wanted to discuss. Based on their suggestions, womENcourage hosted five unconference sessions on the following subjects: Feminism in computing, Women in computing: work-life balance, Improper Syndrome, Data mining, and Learning analytics on the second day of the conference and lasted for an hour each. They were all very successful with a lot of attendees being involved in them which resulted in lively and interesting discussions.

 Workshops

 ‘The workshops were brilliant, I really enjoyed the hands on experience” echos the resounding message from the participants.  Each of the 7 workshops were well attended and they all learned something new from basic electronics to creating wearables to understanding open source code.  Each of the workshops were created by dedicated volunteers who put their time and money into teaching something new: 

• Making Your Ideas into Reality
• Coding for All
• Prototyping: Wearable Electronics
• ACM ICPC
• Introducing Alice
• Contributing to Open Source
• Queer Women in Tech
• ACM-W Volunteers

Results of the feedback shows that this was the most requested part of the program, each of the sessions were full and even had waiting lists.

ACM-W Europe and Coddess Hackathon sponsored by Intel and Microsoft Research

The Hackathon kicked off the womENcourage Celebration in Uppsala. At around 8:30 on Thursday morning, the participants, who came from 17 different countries, began arriving and they were immediately encouraged to mingle and discuss projects. Quickly we saw teams forming and project enthusiasm grow. After a short introduction and some technical instructions, they perused the hardware, collecting sensors and boards, and began with the discussion planning and the implementation of their projects. Team members collaborated nicely and we could see that they became fast friends.

The winning team came from 4 countries: Palestine, Burma, Russia and Sweden. Their project, called “Free Fall”, created a device which can be attached to a person’s wrist or belt and alert if the person suddenly faces a fall.  Specifically, in case of a fall, the proposed device takes the following actions:

1. If the person is unconscious it will contact the person’s primary contact stored in the device
2. If the person is conscious, s/he is given the capability to push a button to cancel the produced alert
3. The capability to contact a secondary contact, stored in the device, is also provided.

The second award called “SAfeHome” went to a portable CO2 and gas alarm system which would be used in houses that have no electricity and that heat with propane.  The idea was that this could save many people in impoverished areas of India and Africa. The device would be inexpensive and easily able to carry with you to use in any situation.

The third award was given to the project “Be My Eyes” which designed a device useful for visually impaired people. The device can be put on their walking stick to provide information about the site they are on, obstacles that they have to avoid, or tourist attractions that are nearby. The device uses GPS which interfaces via Bluetooth to other devices.

At the end of day, there were participants that admitted: “This is the most fun I have had in one day EVER!”   

Thanks to celebration committee, who worked hard to make womENcourage 2015 a big success!

Following this big success, plans are set in place for the next womENcourage 2016 in Linz, Austria, next September.

Crash Course

Lucky me!!! Selected from a wide field of applicants, I joined the volunteer team from Intel as a technical trainer for WiSCI 2015, a STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics) camp for 120 High School Students from 9 different countries (90 from Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Rwanda, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda and 30 from the USA) . As the only female technical trainer in a team of 4 volunteer technical trainers, I feel especially thankful for this opportunity. After months of preparation and planning we arrived in Rwanda late evening with only 4 days before we would start teaching the girls the basics of programming and electronics using the Intel Galileo Board. I met four of my teammates with whom I had only spoken to on the phone at the airport in Brussels, the other three I met at Kigali airport when we landed. Throwing 8 people into a bus, is certainly a good way to get to know each other, the conversations were fast and furious.

Preparation at the school started Thursday afternoon after a long bus ride, our arrival at Gashora Girls Academy was met with shy hellos and direct questions “Are you the Intel teachers?” The girls were finishing the first week of Codu training from Microsoft and had already heard that we were arriving that afternoon. Unpacking the three pallets of equipment was the first order of business, followed by training the Gashora teachers on Friday morning. Friday afternoon we saw the results of the first week of Codu training when the girls presented the games they had developed. I am amazed at the presence they have during the presentation with each of them pitching their resulting projects. This was the first real impression of the girls, I saw accomplished girls who demonstrated their work, some a bit shy, some confident and others hanging back, standing behind their teammates. I knew the next two weeks would be amazing. 

Monday morning, after a long weekend of setup and finalizing the curriculum and content. I walked into my class of 29 young women, they were all full of smiles and laughter. Most had no experience with programming or electronics, but all were eager to learn. The ratio 3 to 30 (1 teacher from Gashora Girls School, 1 helper from our non-technical team members, and myself as the lead trainer to 30 students) presented a difficult situation. My experience working with younger boys and girls for a class earlier in the year, proved that we needed one helper for two teams of two (4 students), unfortunately we were not afforded that luxury at the WiSci 2015. Working with care and precision through the instructions with breadboards, LEDs, wires and resistors, we finally had smiles and shrieks as one LED after another started blinking. Those smiles are my reward for all the work completed in the previous months.

First morning of classes

After a short introduction to programming and introducing the sensors of the Seeed Studio Grove Starter Kit, I saw apprehension creeping into the room. The long day began to take its toll and I heard multiple times ‘I don’t understand’. We continued to work slowly toward 6PM, adding more concepts and materials throughout the afternoon and into the evening. Hindsight is always 20-20 vision and I can see now that the day was much too long. In our first debrief at the end of the day, we made our first change to our original plan, slowing down a bit and agreeing to end classes the rest of the week by 5pm instead of 6 in the evening.

The next morning the students were full of excitement, electronic concepts clouded the vision and small technical issues tended to slow the progress of each of the teams. Our technical team worked during lunch again to resolve some issues and after finding a fix, the bright smiles again filled the rooms. Each girl seemed to glow more as the LCD printed the messages, their smiles

Building our cars

and laughter showed a confidence that did not exist before. Two days into the class we already saw the beginnings of makers and ideas as they became creative during the challenge sessions. In the late afternoon the girls were given a kit to build a robot car, in teams of two they began creating the small vehicles that would be their entries into the drag races.

On the third day, technical issues plagued the teams, I went from group to group to resolve issues. Another lunch hour working and finding a fix. Finally we saw robot cars turning and racing across the room, followed by laughing girls and happy faces. Stepping through the code that controls the direction of driving on the robot car, I explained the concepts and more details of programming. Soon the concept of binary numbers, digital writes and reading the sensors

The winning car

became old news. The immediate result in the direction of movement gave each of them the confidence to try more programming to see how to make the cars drive in circles and along straight lines. With each turn of the wheel and buzz of the motors, I celebrated the opportunity to see each of them growing their knowledge as well as their confidence. Thankful again that I had this amazing opportunity to share technology with each and every one.

If you haven’t already, please check out some of the documentation of the camp via these photos and videos: https://www.flickr.com/photos/wisci/

“Meet the Girls” AOL Video: http://on.aol.com/partner/aol-originals-517149677/videoId=519006984

“Women in Tech” AOL Video: http://on.aol.com/partner/aol-originals-517149677/playlist=125418?icid=bottom_related_thumb_0

“The Final Week” AOL Videl: http://on.aol.com/partner/aol-originals-517149677/videoId=519006959?icid=bottom_related_thumb_6