In Her Own Words: Report Backs from ACM-W Scholarship Recipients

The first ACM-W Scholarship for Conference Attendance was awarded in June, 2006. Here we present, in their own words, reports from some of the recipients in which they discuss the impact the conference attendance had on them. As you can see, the scholarship recipients are from all levels of academic study and we continue to welcome applications from those already committed to research and those who would like to investigate what the research side of the field is like.

The advisor of one recipient had this to say: "I want to tell you ... how pleased I am with the efforts of ACM-W and ACM to promote and encourage the development of our bright young women in the computing disciplines. ...... is an outstanding example of the potential available to leadership positions in the future from these investments."



Sarah Moody Swann, Systematic Approaches to Digital Forensics Engineering
The conference was a great experience. This was my first conference at which I presented a full paper rather than just a poster. With my previous experiences presenting posters, the attendees were only partially interested in my research as they lacked the background to appreciate the contributions of the research. The experience at SADFE was very different. All the attendees seemed to be honestly interested and had come from either the same field or a closely related one. I found myself respected as a presenter and as a professional in the field. My research provided an enlightening experience for me and provided new knowledge for the research area.

I gained so much from attending this conference. I was able to begin networking with some of the leading professionals in the field, as well as hone my presentation and communication skills in a professional and scientific setting. It was a great experience being with so many talented professionals, as well as to see and learn in more depth about the other new developments in the field and related areas. I conversed with other graduate students and socialized with some of the best professionals in the field of computer forensics. Attending this conference and participating as a presenter helped me to see my own potential as a researcher, scientist and leader.

Thank you for making it possible for me to attend.


Karen DelDuca, SIGCSE 2008, The Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education
I found the conference experience to be both educational and motivational. It gave me the opportunity to present the research I am working on to people who were interested in similar fields, and I also was able to learn about what other students, like myself, were doing, as well as other researchers and faculty members. I spoke to people from other institutions and learned about their projects, which has helped me think about where I may choose to attend graduate school. Other graduate students provided valuable information as well; they were able to tell me not only about the research they were doing but also about the graduate school application process. I now feel more prepared for life after undergraduate school.

Attending the conference has motivated me to continue pursuing research work. Attending talks and listening to keynote speakers who were excited about the things they were doing made me feel excited as well, knowing that I too can be a part of the ongoing studies of computer science. Hearing about pertinent topics in the field first-hand brought them to life; whereas I have read numerous articles and abstracts about research topics, they do not convey the same passion that the researchers themselves do in person. I would love to become engrossed in a project that fascinates me and make my own contributions to the field, and to share these contributions at future conferences .


Ayswarya Sundaram, Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems Conference
I had a wonderful experience presenting the poster and attending the paper presentations in the conference. It was very exciting to meet the professors whose papers I have read and whose work I have followed closely for a long time. It also gave me the opportunity to discuss my work with them and get their valuable feedback. The conference provided me a chance to network with other graduate students in their doctoral programs and get to know their experiences. Most important of all, I was able to get to know the professors and the graduate students whom I hope to work with during my Ph.D. Overall the conference strengthened my resolve to get a Ph.D.


Vetria Byrd, Life Sciences Society Computational Systems Bioinformatics Conference
The conference at Stanford University was a great learning experience. The week began with two tutorials...The rest of the week consisted of talks and presentations from several areas of bioinformatics from Structural Bioinformatics, Microarray Data Analysis, and Computational Genomics to Protein Functions and Biological Pathways. In addition to student presentations and poster sessions the conference included several invited speakers who are considered experts in their respective fields. It was nice to hear and see authors of papers that I have read in my literature review...

The conference provided many opportunities for networking and meeting new as well as familiar colleagues in the field. I was able to converse with people in academia, industry, research and even government researchers....What I found most helpful was the sharing of ideas and thoughts regarding the current challenges and what open problems exist in Bioinformatics. ... As a doctoral student in the midst of refining my dissertation topic, attending this conference at this time in my academic career gave me the opportunity to talk with leaders and up-and-coming researchers in the field about what they feel are much needed areas for continue research.... I am very appreciative of the opportunity given to me by my department and ACM-W to attend this conference.


Jaymie Strecker, International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering and Workshop on Advances in Model-Based Software Testing

I am grateful to have been able to attend this year's ISSRE and the co-located A-MOST. ISSRE brought together people from academia, industry, and government to discuss an array of topics, including testing, metrics, security and risk assessment. A-MOST focused on a single way to insure reliability - model-based testing - which is the approach I plan to use in my dissertation. I had the pleasure of presenting my recent work on test coverage at ISSRE's Fast Abstracts session, a forum where researchers can talk about ongoing, unpolished work and get feedback on how to proceed.

One lesson that ISSRE/A-MOST hammered into me was that the simulated world in which researchers conduct experiments differs greatly from the actual world. For example, in the research world a testing process should satisfy at least 100-percent statement coverage....In practice, testers usually cover at most 80 percent of statements; imperfect software is acceptable....

One of the interesting debates at ISSRE/A-MOST was "What do we mean by 'software model'?" During A-MOST's panel discussion, I asked - expecting a definitive answer - what exactly sets model-based testing apart from other kinds of testing. Rather than a pat answer, I got a thoughtful discussion, in which several of the panel and audience noted that all testing is model-based in some sense of the work "model". .....

As you can see, ISSRE/A-MOST taught me a lot about my research area. I hope that ACM-W will continue to support students' conference travel through scholarships in the future.


Sunayana Sitaram, Opportunities for Undergraduate Research in Computer Science (OURCS)

Opportunities for Undergraduate Research in Computer Science (OURCS) was a Conference held in October 2007 at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA, aimed at undergraduate women studying Computer Science considering taking up research as a career in the future. The conference was sponsored by Microsoft Research and organized by Women@SCS, a group of women students and faculty of the School of Computer Science, CMU. Some of the keynote speakers included this year's Turing Award winner, Fran Allen, Jennifer Tour Chayes from Microsoft Research and Jeanette Wing, former Head of the Computer Science Department at CMU.

The most exciting parts of the conference were the research workshops, which gave all the participants a chance to work with researchers from Microsoft Research and CMU on problems in robotics, human-computer interaction, experimental math etc. over the three days. My group worked on 'Exploring Online Credibility', in which we addressed the problem of determining the credibility of Wikipedia articles, designed algorithms to calculate it and also designed the front end of a system that could actually be used by Wikipedia.

Listening to Fran Allen speak and share her experiences as a woman in the early days of Computer Science was the highlight of the entire trip for me. This was the first time I had been outside my country, India, and it was a very memorable experience.


Pooja Viswanathan, Precarn Intelligent Systems conference

The ACM-W scholarship allowed me to travel to Montreal, where I had the opportunity of presenting a poster at the Precarn Intelligent Systems (IS) 2007 conference. I was also able to attend 3 other conferences, which were co-located in Montreal. As a poster presenter, I shared my experiences in developing and testing my intelligent wheelchair in various environments. Several researchers gave me valuable feedback and offered new ideas, which I am currently pursuing. Presenting at the conference helped me enhance my presentation skills and refine my research objectives. The poster session, awards banquet and workshops also provided me with opportunities to network with professors and other graduate students.

The joint conference exposed me to current research in the areas of AI, graphics, robotics, vision & intelligent systems. The technical sessions were very educational and exposed me to novel techniques. I was able to see several examples of real-life applications of artificial intelligence in the demo session. Such applications often pose a wide variety of research and deployment challenges. Through the conference, I learnt about the challenges researchers have been faced with, ways to overcome these challenges, and issues that are yet to be resolved. I continue to be in touch with some of the researchers I met at the conference, and hope to collaborate with them in the near future!


Eleni Varsaki, IEEE International Workshop on Multimedia Signal Processing (MMSP)

It was a great opportunity to present the paper entitled "Data Hiding in H.264 Encoded Video Sequences" coauthored by Spyridon Kapotas, Eleni Varsaki, Athanassios Skodras. The presentation took place on a poster session, where remarkable papers on Watermarking and Data Hiding were presented. I had the chance to discuss with researchers from all over the world working on the same area with us and to hear all about signal processing news evolution. Nevertheless I proved great emotions when well known researchers approached our stand, took a good look at our poster and looked excited from our work. It is truly a success to see that our work is recognized by other researchers.

The poster session was the last day of the conference so in the meantime I had the opportunity to discuss with great researchers in the field. The conference topics were very interesting, as multimedia sessions had taken place. Invited talks of great researchers were very challenging, ..... such as multimedia Technologies for Children, Musical Sound Synthesis, Ambient Intelligence and Augmented Reality.

Concluding I would like to add that I found my attendance to such a ..... conference very positive.


Jennifer Dolson, SIGGRAPH

Attending SIGGRAPH was an enriching experience for me in terms of gaining practical knowledge, learning about projects on the cutting edge of the graphics field, and gaining insight into what it might be like to perform research in graduate school and beyond. SIGGRAPH inspired me to continue the pursuit of my goal of being admitted to a PhD program. Attending the paper presentations made me aware not only of the topics on the cutting edge of graphics, but also of which institutions are leading in the graphics field, and the focus of those institutions. For example, many of the paper presentations at SIGGRAPH that I attended and found to be especially interesting were co-authored by researchers from Berkeley; I found the presentation of "Interactive Cutaway Illustrations of Complex 3D Models," a work co-authored by Maneesh Agrawala, extremely interesting. "Multiscale Shape and Detail Enhancement from Multi Light Image Collections," also co-authored by Professor Agrawala of Berkeley, was fascinating. Finally, I gained many invaluable opportunities to discuss the field of graphics, as well as graduate school opportunities, with my own UVA professors and with UVA graduate students that I might not have had outside of the conference setting.


Hosna Jabbari, EuroMicro

I am very pleased that I managed to attend the EuroMicro conference to present my undergraduate work on a new class of cellular automata. One of the main things that caught my eyes was the number of women attending the conference; they were very few women there and even fewer female students. There were so ... few female students that I was asked a couple of times if I was a new faculty member! I got a little intimidated at the beginning by this fact; however, I managed to do a decent job in presenting my work. At the beginning of my presentation I was nervous, but when I got going, I felt more confident and by the end of the talk I was very confident in answering the questions I got from the audience. Based on the comments I got from the conference, I am now very confident that I can get my work published as a journal paper very soon.

It was my first attendance in an international conference; it was also my first time in Europe. I found it quite interesting to see different people with different cultures and different view points on different subjects.

Thank you again for helping me attend this conference.


Lauren Cairco, Virtual Reality Software and Technology conference (VRST).

I feel that my time at VRST this year was overall well-spent. The most beneficial part of the conference for me was presenting my poster. It was rewarding to see people take enough interest in my work to come and ask me questions about it as well as offer recommendations on how I could improve my application. Even though I had been practicing with other visitors in our lab, talking with people who were less familiar with my project helped me learn to speak confidently and clearly about my work and to thoughtfully accept questions and criticism about it. Equally important in the poster presentation was the opportunity it gave me to meet people. Between the poster presentation and the various tasks I was responsible for as a student volunteer, I spoke with most of the people who attended. I became friends with several other students and learned a lot from talking with them about their schools and areas of interest. I met a lot of professors as well as some professionals in industry, and conversations with them helped me pair familiar names with their faces, and gave me more insight into their work.

Also valuable to me were the presentations I got to attend. My favorite sessions were the ones on crowds, avatars, education, and entertainment. I enjoy listening to the different approaches people have taken to problems, especially those that affect the work I do. I love seeing how much creativity and innovation others bring to their work, and the wide variety of applications that are currently being developed in virtual reality. I look forward to spending more time with the proceedings and reading in closer detail about the presentations I attended.