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."



Paula Bach, Pennsylvania State University, The 5th International Conference on Open Source Systems, 2009

On the first day we met all of the DC people and had fun playing crazy golf in the cold and then rain. The great thing about social events is that the socializing usually surrounds great discussions about everyone's research. But even before I arrived here, the thoroughness with which the reviewers gave feedback helped my dissertation tremendously. The reviews helped me think through some methodological issues that I've been wrestling with and in revising the DC paper, I rewrote some key sections that are better now. The DC was great. I enjoyed seeing other students in different stages with vastly different approaches and goals to their research. But somehow because we share one domain, one context, all seemed applicable on at least one level to my research and some on several.

I presented my full paper in a session that included two other research papers in a similar area-usability and open source software. In fact the papers investigated similar issues but from different perspectives so that each of the studies validated one another. I have established several possible collaborative partnerships. Of course the other sessions are very interesting when people present such a diversity of topics but also talking to people is informative and a lot of fun. So talking more about my research and hearing about others' work and how it may connect to mine is really beneficial. Because the context (open source software) is the same, it is fairly easy to find some cross-over with other people's work because we learn more about the open source environment and it most likely helps our own research.


Jieun Chae, University of Pennsylvania, European Association of Computational Linguists 2009

Aending EACL 2009 was a great experience both academically and personally for me. It was a great pleasure to discuss about up-to-date technology about Natural Language Processing with other great researchers. I can feel their passion about NLP and endless curiosity about new technology.

I posted my research about evaluating the sentence quality using syntactic features. The title of the paper was "Predicting the fluency of text with shallow structural features: case studies of machine translation and human-written text". I got lots of questions in the poster session and some advices of other researches about the experiment were very interesting.

In addition, personally it was the first experience that I attend the international conference and also my first time in Europe. I enjoyed the time in Greece.

After the conference, I got the opportunity to submit a chapter based on my EACL paper for the Springer book about Natural language generation. Thanks for all experience and opportunity that I can get from this scholarship!


Lauren Wilcox, Columbia University, ACM SigCHI 2009

At the ACM Sig CHI 2009 Conference, I attended several thought-provoking research presentations and panels, engaged in discussions and special interest group meetings on various topics in HCI research, and participated in social activities. The ACM Sig CHI conference brings together HCI researchers, designers, engineers and practitioners all in a single conference, and the interdisciplinary audience is exciting and unique.

The most rewarding opportunity at the conference was the chance to present my research in the ACM CHI Student Research Competition. It was great to speak with the panel of judges and get their feedback on my work. I also participated in a useful workshop, "Evaluating New Interactions in Healthcare" about evaluating novel technologies in health care settings, a topic directly related to my research. I met several other Ph.D. students and researchers in both academia and industry, and talked with them about their career paths. I also attended valuable panel discussions on non-research-related topics in Human-Computer Interaction.

I really appreciated the opportunity to discuss my research with others, and hear about their work and backgrounds. I met with research mentors from different institutions and reconnected with several other colleagues whom I don't often have a chance to see. Because I was a volunteer for the conference, I also got a taste of the organizational side of conference planning. I helped to contribute to just a few of the many pieces that must come together to hold an event like this!

Thanks again ACM-W for the great experience!


Wanmin Wu, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, IEEE International Symposium on Multimedia

Thanks to the grant, I was able to present my paper in the IEEE International Symposium on Multimedia 2008. The presentation was well received. I got very interesting questions that inspired me about the future plans to further expand the work. For example, one of the questions was about how our system handles view dynamics, which was not particularly addressed in the paper presented. This turned out to be an important research question for the next step of our research. Several attendees were very interested in our tele-immersive project, and came to discuss with me after the talk, and I was able to show some video demos to them. This certainly increases the visibility of our work, and may open new doors to following research or future collaboration. During the conference, I also attended other sessions of presentations, and got to know the latest problems this community has been exploring. The conference was also an excellent opportunity for networking, which allowed me to connect with several professors and PhD students in other institutions.


Anne Van Devender, Washington and Lee University, ACM SIGCHI 2009

Attending CHI met, if not exceeded, my expectations. It was incredible getting to see the "celebrities" of HCI like Hiroshi Ishii and Wendy Kellogg. The talks were not only informative, but they were also inspiring and entertaining. I think I had more new ideas for projects and research in those five days, than I have ever had. It was an atmosphere that bred creativity and innovation. I hope to take some of those ideas with me next year as I go on to graduate school.

While I expected the intellectual atmosphere, I was pleasantly surprised by the social one. Networking was a major part of my experience at CHI. I got a chance to talk to graduate students not just about their presentations, but about what I can expect in the first year of a Ph.D. program. Everyone, from students to professors, was approachable and friendly. Going to the conference alone was not scary; in fact, I think it helped me make more friends and contacts.

Overall, it was an amazing experience from the presentations and papers to the receptions and coffee breaks. Everything was made possible by ACM-W. Thank you!


Kelly Yackovich, Ohio State University, Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 2009

Attending the Hawaii International Confererence on System Sciences was a great experience for many reasons. Being a truly international conference with 40 countries represented, it was a great venue for me to meet other scholars from around the world. Since the conference is a very diverse one in terms of topics and tracks, I had opportunities to meet people who are doing research in fields and application areas very different from mine. Meeting and interacting with other researchers in the same application area was also very helpful. It was fascinating to see how the same application area was being investigated by social science researchers as well as engineering researchers, and to see how my work might fit into, and advance, the research area as a whole. I saw, for the first time, how a group of people working on problems in the same topic area truly come together as a community by sharing their work with each other, collaborating on projects and publications, and organizing events such as this one to facilitate dissemination and advancement of new knowledge.

I also had the opportunity to present my group's research in one of the application area tracks. In addition to gaining experience presenting ideas and results to a different audience than I am accustomed to, I was affirmed when I received questions from the audience that were very closely aligned with the questions and challenges that I and my group are trying to work through right now. I was also enlightened and encouraged when I received comments that revealed different thoughts and angles on the problem that we hadn't yet considered. I can see how the sharing that takes place through the conference structure is important for finding new angles and insights into research challenges.


Chloe Fan, Wellesley College, ACM SIGCHI 2009

This year, I attended my first SIGCHI conference in Boston. Having recently decided to go to graduate school in Human-Computer Interaction and currently attending Wellesley College, a 30-minute drive from Boston, this was a great opportunity to not only network with the professionals in the industry and academia, but also to see the best of current research in the field. I was able to meet some of the faculty members and graduate students I will be working with at Carnegie Mellon and talk to them about their research and mine. Talking with graduate students during their poster sessions allowed me to see what graduate-level research was like, and to get ideas for my projects. Many of the talks I went to were very interesting and inspiring, and it was great to meet several researchers whose work I had only heard about before.

Computer Science is a relatively small major at Wellesley College. I can now share my experiences at CHI with other students in computing majors and encourage them in their own academic career. More specifically, I hope to bring more Human-Computer Interaction awareness to students in computing majors here and encourage them to think interdisciplinary while working on their own projects. As for myself, I am even more excited about entering the field of HCI, and look forward to graduate school this fall.

Thank you for this opportunity!


Laurel Riek, University of Cambridge, ACM/IEEE Conference on Human Robot Interaction

The 2009 HRI conference was a wonderful experience and I was very glad to be able to attend. This year's theme, "Interacting Naturally with Robots", was concerned with the importance of people being able to interact with robots in a way similar to how they interact with humans. This theme was seen in a number of interesting papers and posters presented on non-verbal interaction methods, such as gaze, facial expression, body gesture, and touch. These methods were discussed from both a recognition perspective (what is the human doing) as well as a generation perspective (how can the robot communicate to the human what it is doing).

At the conference I also had the opportunity to participate in the HRI Pioneers Workshop, which is a forum for young researchers to get together to present their work, share ideas, as well as discuss important issues in the field. The workshop was really enjoyable - I was able to receive helpful feedback on my work, meet a lot of other researchers, and was challenged to consider tackling some big problems in our field in a fun and interesting way.

I am very thankful to ACM-W for their support in helping me attend this conference.


Gulsen Taskin, Istanbul Technical University, The 19th International Conference on Pattern Recognition, 2008.

The conference had been so useful for my scientific research. Especially in the conference, I could have a chance to be able to follow the recent news on the method that I have been studying. ..... there was a paper that I know before in the conference about KNN. I had been studying this paper before I attended the conference. I had a chance to listen to it and ask some question about it. I asked for the code of their program to apply it for my research.

Especially, plenary session had been really good for me. They summarized the result of the latest works that have been analyzed recently and mentioned some important methods which are used for many pattern recognition applications.

Nevertheless, I learned that a new technology named as CUDA, which is different than the classical parallel architectures, is extensively used to accelerate softwares. In my future studies, I might need to use it, if my program would be too slow.

As a result, there are lots of things that I've learned for my research in the conference. Thank you again to all of you for funding me to attend this conference.


Gabriela Gheorghe, University of Trento, Italy. ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, 2008.

For the security community, the ACM CCS is a first tier conference involving a tight circle of professionals. As a first year PhD student, having a paper accepted at one of CCS's workshops was for me a great opportunity and reward to attend both events. The experience was worth every minute: I had the chance to discuss my work in DRM systems with a group of excellent researchers from academia and industry, I made some friends with whom I will collaborate in the near future, and I learnt a great deal about how to present my work to a high-end audience.

Attending CCS was more than an eye-opening experience. In my university, the group of people engaged in security research is reduced in number, and our interests are quite spread. Throughout the seminars that I gave and attended in my university, I was frequently defending security as 'another aspect' for people with a broad rather than in-depth knowledge related to my area. CCS, on the other hand, gathered top security people in one place, and this offered me the chance to go in depth when discussing my work and theirs. Along with studying cutting-edge approaches in security, I caught a glimpse of the great enthusiasm of the leaders of this field, and now I feel so grateful and honored that I had the chance to share my passion for computer security and technology with them.

I am determined to be part of CCS next year! I thank you for this opportunity and I hope the ACM-W initiative will support other women in research as well.


Angelica Garcia Gutierrez, Jacobs University, Bremen, Germany. International Conference on Computer Science and Applications, 2008.
As a graduate student, the WCECS/ICCSA conference was an ideal place to find out about current research in my field -Scientific Databases- as well as in some related areas. As I had the opportunity to participate in the conference as a speaker, it was highly motivating to observe the interest from recognized researchers in my PhD work. An important aspect of the conference was the time slot dedicated for questions from the attendants to the speakers. Often, the questions were challenging and provided an opportunity for further discussion and debate.

Also, the conference provided me the opportunity to establish contacts with recognized scientists and professionals that not only encouraged me to complete my PhD but who also showed interest in my curriculum. I noticed that the participation of women in this congress was a minority, but I hope that through organizations such as ACM-W more and more women may be encouraged to take leading roles in the scientific community.

I am deeply thankful to ACM-W for supporting my participation at this conference.


Sonia Haiduc, Wayne State University. International Conference on Program Comprehension, 2008.
Attending the International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC 2008) was an extraordinary experience for me. ICPC was the first conference I ever attended and the first chance I had to meet people from my research community. I met esteemed researchers, who are behind the papers I have been reading since I started graduate school, but also fellow PhD. students, with whom I still keep in touch. Also, having the opportunity to present my research in front of a distinguished audience was a very important step in my career. I was pleased to get very good feedback on my work and to find people really interested in what I am doing. Overall, attending the conference was a great, unforgettable experience.


Maneesha Ramesh, AMRITA University. ICWN 2008
The conference was informative, nice and well organized. I was able to meet researchers in the same field and we were able to share a lot of our common interests. A group of researchers who attended the conference was really interested in my work and this boosted my enthusiasm and confidence level. I have also met a few key researchers in my area of interest (wireless sensor networks) and the conference acted as a venue to exchange the practical problems faced by us during the research. We still communicate with each other and help each other to solve the road blocks faced by each one of us.


Lauren Mandilian. SIGGRAPH 2008.
I have been a Student Volunteer at the Siggraph conference for the past 3 years. This is the first year that I was able to attend Siggraph as a contributor. I presented a poster about my Master's thesis, "Information Overload: A Collaborative Multimedia Dance Performance."

Throughout the week, poster presenters were required to stand next to their posters and answer any questions conference attendees might have about their work. Many people came up to me and asked about my project. All of them were very impressed with my work; in fact, I might collaborate with some of them in the future.

I am so glad I was able to attend the Siggraph conference this year and get my work out there for people to see. Thanks again for the scholarship.


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.