Empowerment through Computing:

UMBC Students, Faculty & Staff Join in the Celebration of Women in Computing

UMBC students and faculty proudly participated in the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing Conference. This year was particularly special as the conference was hosted in their

hometown of Baltimore. The conference was presented by the Anita Borg Institute in partnership with the Association for Computing Machinery. The annual conference is designed to be the largest venue of its kind for women to come together to celebrate their achievements as well as to network, mentor and collaborate for the purpose of creating more opportunities for women to contribute to and advance the field of computing. The conference bears the namesake of Admiral Grace Murray Hopper, who was a pioneer as a Naval Officer, a mathematician and a computer programmer°.

UMBC was represented by student, faculty and staff members from the Department of Information Systems, the Center for Women in Technology, the Department of Computer Science, and The Graduate School at UMBC. The group had the opportunity to interact with leaders in computing across industry, academia and government. UMBC was also well represented by UMBC students, faculty, and staff who staffed the UMBC booth throughout the conference. IS Department students and faculty also gave presentations at the conference. IS

PhD student Huimin Qian gave a talk entitled “Improving Access to Mobile Technologies Using Tactile Feedback”¹, undergraduate student Alec Pulianas presented a poster entitled “Access MT: A Multi-touch Tabletop Built with Accessibility in Mind”², and Research Assistant Dr. Lisa Anthony gave a talk entitled “Understanding How Children Use Touchscreens”³. IS Faculty Dr. Sreedevi Sampath and Dr. Amy Hurst led the initiative for the IS Department’s co-sponsorship of UMBC’s representation at the conference, which included IS PhD students Cailing Dong, Germaine Irwin, Barbara Linam-Church, Huimin Qian, Yanan Sun, Lisa Vizerand Allison Young, as well as IS undergraduate students Emily Ciavolino, Tierre Franklin, Tabitha Haverkamp and Samantha McDonald. UMBC’s and the Department of Information Systems’ support of the faculty’s and students’ participation in this conference helps underscore the University’s commitment to fostering opportunities for woman to excel in science and technology.

° http://gracehopper.org/2012/about/about-grace-hopper

¹ http://www.slideshare.net/umbcinfosystems/ghc2012-qian-huiminoct2

² http://www.flickr.com/photos/umbcinfosystems/8221130980/lightbox

³ http://drlanthony.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/brown-and-anthony-ghc2012-talk1.pdf