UMass CS Women

Grace Hopper Celebration Experiences, Part I

10/27/2015

In past years, CS Women has held a lunch after the annual Grace Hopper Celebration for students who have attended to share their experiences. Since GHC is now well-known, we are retiring this practice and are instead asking those who went to tell us a bit about their experience for a blog post, so that new students can benefit from their experiences. Rose Tharail John has written a wonderful essay on her experiences at GHC this year, which we have reproduced in full below.

Firstly I must thank the CICS and our sponsors - Yahoo, for giving us the opportunity to be a part of such a huge gathering. It was my first time at GHC and I must say - it was a truly amazing experience. It was overwhelming to see so much energy and enthusiasm in a 12000 odd crowd, all gathered to promote one thing we all believe in - women in technology. It went to prove how much we can actually improve the world around us just by working together and sharing ideas.

I wish I could attend all the sessions they were offering; for which I had to invent time travel! The ones I attended were extremely informative and encouraging. I especially liked the Microsoft's "Fun with Machine Learning" tech node. The session was thoughtfully developed - touching upon basics and moving on to giving a general idea on more advanced ML concepts with fun real life examples. Their use of Azure ML to drive home the concept was effective and at the end of the session most of us, left a little wiser on Machine Learning.

In the first day's plenary, Clara Shih CEO and Founder of Hearsay Social shared with us her wisdom of how she navigated and won in a Man's World. Her thoughts on the subject were meaningful and I believe is something all of us women, who aspire to break the ice must follow - do not overreact by being offensive, rather let the men know that you too are one among them in a subtle but effective manner. This can help go a long way and bridge many useful relationships for the future.

The career fair had a plethora of companies and I realized on Day 1 that it would not be possible for me to talk to everyone even if I tried to. I could sense the energy among students and recruiters. I appreciated the fact that every single person I talked to, took time to review my resume, ask me questions and gauge my fit for their teams and also explain what they were working on. I happened to meet so many passionate and accomplished women who are now guiding teams or divisions of their own. The cherry on the cake for me, came in the form of Intel offering me a Full time opportunity to join their Cloud Platform team.

I would love it, if we as a group could host a mini Grace Hopper every year. Given that we have so many colleges near us and that UMass CICS has such excellent credentials, I only felt it was appropriate for us to host something similar and open our doors to female coding community in the five colleges area. It would be a great opportunity for us all to share our experiences and grow in our knowledge.

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Invited Speaker: Valerie Barr

10/23/2015

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On October 6, CS Women held a special lunch sponsored by Prof. Lori Clarke for Invited Speaker Prof. Valerie Barr. Prof. Barr. Later that day Prof. Barr gave a talk on curricular changes to the Computer Science program that Union College has made under her direction.

Thanks to our Scribe, Sofya Vorotnikova, for her excellent notes!

Invited speaker: Valerie Barr

Valerie Barr is a professor at Union College and is currently serving as chair of the ACM Committee on Women in Computing (ACM-W). Having an electrical engineer as her father and a teacher and activist as her mother, Valerie Barr is a perfect synthesis of her parents: a computer scientist who cares about people and is trying to change the world. She attended Mount Holyoke College as an undergraduate and later received her Masters degree from New York University and PhD from Rutgers University.

During the lunch, Valerie Barr and members of the CS Women group discussed such topics as:

experiences attending a women's college
ACM-W organization and work as a chair
getting more women involved in computing: reaching out to middle school and high school students, working and volunteering for ACM-W, using social media to spread information about the issue
the influence of parents and teachers on young girls and their future involvement in STEM fields, the importance of good teacher education
the importance of maintaining an academic record and scientific credibility while being involved in social work

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Teacher Training for Technical Skills Workshops

10/18/2015

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On Sunday 9/27 and Monday 9/28, CS Women hosted our first-ever teacher training workshop and retreat for the volunteers who will be leading Symantec-funded technical skills workshops throughout the rest of the semester.

On Sunday, Apoorva Balevalachilu, John Foley, Tian Guo, Cibele Freire, Shamya Karumbaiah, Anupama Pasumarthy, Emma Strubell, Emma Tosch gathered to put together the cirriculum for the semester. Ari Kobren and Pat Verga were unable to attend, but will be participating as well. Topics for this semester include git, LatTeX, basic and intermediate bash skills, Unix, and possibly some advanced/fun topics like graphing (matplotlib, R, d3), using the Twitter API, and others.

On Monday, the team headed to Mt. Holyoke's Willits-Hallowell Center for active learning training with Rachel Rybaczuk, and a retreat on the college's beautiful campus:

We are very excited to announce that Bootcamp/Office hours for setup for the workshop series will be held Tuesday, October 20th in rooms 150 and 151 of the CICS building from 4pm to 6pm.

The first workshop will be on git on Tuesday, September 27th in 150/151 from 4--6pm (same as Bootcamp) and will be lead by Shamya.

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First Lunch Features Prof. Alexandra Meliou

10/16/2015

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We held our first lunch of the semester on Wednesday, September 23rd, where Prof. Alexandra Meliou spoke about her research analyzing data errors in databases, and her experiences in graduate school. 37 people attended: 25 graduate students, 7 undergraduate students, 2 staff members, 2 faculty members, and 1 post-doctorate researcher.

Research abstract
Reverse-engineering data: Explaining data and diagnosing errors
Alexandra Meliou

Online repositories, marketplaces, and other sharing platforms have facilitated the dissemination, availability, and sharing of data. At the same time, sources of data are becoming more diverse, more complex, and more interconnected. In this new data-producing and data-sharing world, most data is not curated and data origin and derivation are often obscured. Yet, now more than ever, applications are heavily data-driven and important decisions are made based on data (e.g., what infrastructure should the government invest in, or who gets a mortgage). In this talk, I will discuss new evolving needs of data analysis, including providing explanations and facilitating data understanding, and diagnosing problems in data.

Personal abstract
Anticipating, avoiding, and sometimes embracing our failures
Alexandra Meliou

Failure is a normal part of life and of academia. More often than not, what we consider failures are not dreadful disasters, but rather, missed opportunities. I will talk about my own experiences with failure, the opportunities I missed, in particular during my graduate career, and the lessons I learned.

Bio
Alexandra Meliou is an Assistant Professor in the College of Information and Computer Science, at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She has held this position since September 2012. Prior to that, she was a Post-Doctoral Research Associate at the University of Washington, working with Dan Suciu. Alexandra received her PhD and MS degrees from the Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences Department at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2009 and 2005, respectively. She is the recipient of a 2015 NSF CAREER Award, a 2013 Google Faculty Research Award, and a 2008 Siebel Scholarship.

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Second Annual Ice Cream Social a Success!

10/14/2015

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For the second year in a row, we ran a very successful Ice Cream Social! This year it was on Friday, September 18th. 34 members attended in total, with 19 graduate students, 13 undergraduate students, one staff member, and one faculty member. A variety of cold desserts were served.

We also used this event to introduce our newest CS Women Co-Chairs: Emma Strubell and Supriya Kankure. Emma and Supriya will serve two-semester terms, from Fall 2015--Spring 2015. Other general announcements included our status on becoming a Graduate Student Organization. As of today, we have been accepted as a GSO (1). However, we are still working on the organizational structure. If you have any suggestions, please take a look at our constitution on GitHub and leave comments there!

Unfortunately, we were not able to get pictures this year! If you attended and have pictures to send us, to attach to this post, please contact one of our Social Media Chairs: Nabanita De or Diane Tam.

(1) Note: There seems to have been a clerical error in the processing of our organization's name -- we are currently working to remove "Graduate" from the group name, since this group is open to all affiliates of CICS.

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Third lunch talk with Visitors from BBN

4/22/2015

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Today we were thrilled to host Bobby Simidcheiva (PhD '15) and Vicky Manfredi (PhD '09) from Raytheon BBN! They gave a presentation about their work with BBN and held an open Q&A with students after the event.

Raytheon BBN kindly sponsored this lunch. In addition two our two guests and a recruiter, 16 graduate students, 2 undergraduates, and one staff member attended. After the event ended, some of the students who attended graciously stepped outside for a photo in the wind:

Abstract

Have you been wondering about what life is like after school? We are here to help. We are two recent PhD computer science graduates from UMass Amherst now working as researchers at Raytheon BBN Technologies. In this talk, we will give you some background about BBN, share with you how we found jobs there, describe what working at BBN is like, and answer your questions about networking for jobs and transitioning to a non-academic environment.

Raytheon BBN Technologies has been providing advanced technology research and development for over 60 years. From the ARPANET, to the first email, to the first stereo digital mammography system, through the first metro network protected by quantum cryptography, BBN has consistently transitioned advanced research to produce innovative, practical technology solutions for our customers. Today, BBN's innovations allow for ubiquitous networking and speech understanding in any language or format. BBN scientists and engineers continue to take risks and challenge conventions to create new and fundamentally better solutions.

Bios

Vicky Manfredi is Network Scientist at BBN Technologies. Her current work focuses on designing efficient and secure communication protocols for ad hoc and heterogeneous networks. She also works on problems at the frontier between computer networks and machine learning. Her prior work has looked at the trade-off between incurring some cost (such as control packets or energy) to obtain updated information about the network as conditions change, versus the utility of that information for informing behavior. Vicky received a Ph.D and an M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and a B.A. in Computer Science and Neuroscience from Smith College. Prior to BBN, Vicky was a Computing Innovation Fellow at Boston University.

Bobby Simidchieva is a research scientist in the the Distributed Systems group at BBN. Since joining BBN last year, she has primarily been working on quantifying and characterizing cyber security risks. Through modeling distributed systems and the defenses available for deployment, as well as the various attacks that adversaries could execute, we can predict what attacks are feasible and attach metrics such as cost and security to different defenses. In previous work, Bobby has worked on the modeling and analysis of complex human-intensive systems. Her dissertation focused on the explicit specification of variation in families of human-intensive systems to make their modeling more precise and facilitate their subsequent analysis. She recently completed her Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and holds dual B.S. degrees in computer science and computational science from the State University of New York, College at Brockport.

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Second Lunch of the Semester Brings Audrey St. John

4/3/2015

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Oh, what a belated blog post!

On Tuesday, March 10th, Prof. Audrey St. John (UMass PhD '08) gave a two-part talk on her research in rigidity theory (a branch of computational geometry) and running a research program with undergraduates.

17 members attended, including 13 graduate students, 2 undergraduate students, one faculty member and one staff member.

Research abstract
Rigidity Theory for Robotics, Drug Design and CAD
Audrey St. John

When designing a bridge, how can we minimize the amount of building materials while maintaining stability? Are there computational tools that can help predict protein flexibility, a key component in drug design? Rigidity theory seeks to answer these questions by studying structural properties from mathematical and computational perspectives. In this talk, I will discuss the fundamental questions considered by rigidity theory and its applications, including those in robotics, structural biology and Computer Aided Design for mechanical engineers.

Other abstractSearching for a Career PathAudrey St. John
A career path is exactly that: a path (and not a shortest path!). Search and traversal of it is a lot like what you learn about in Algorithms and AI: you're discovering new nodes and edges, and you're trying to define the function to optimize. I'll talk about my own pathway to my current position, the choices I've made and why I would make them again.

BioAudrey St. John is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Mount Holyoke College. Her research is motivated by computational challenges arising in robotics, biology and Computer Aided Design; in 2013, she received a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award from the National Science Foundation (NSF). St. John earned a B.A. in Computer Science and Mathematics from Wellesley College (Summa Cum Laude, Honors in CS), followed by an M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from UMass Amherst (her graduate work was partially supported by an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship).

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First Lunch of the Semester Features Research Scientist Laura Dietz

2/21/2015

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Research Scientist Laura Dietz kicked off the Spring 2015 semester of CS Women events with a two-part lunch talk on Feb. 11.

Queripidia - Query-specific Wikipedia Construction
Abstract: We all turn towards Wikipedia with questions we want to know more about, but eventually find ourselves on the limit of its coverage. Instead of providing "ten blue links", my goal is to answer any web query with something that looks and feels like Wikipedia. I am developing algorithms to automatically retrieve, extract, and compile a knowledge resource for a given web query. For a very early web demo with some example queries see: http://ciir.cs.umass.edu/~dietz/queripidia/

Build a Shrine to Yourself
Abstract: Am I good enough? Is this the right topic? Am I in the right place? Am I passionate enough? If I switch now, will my career be over? - I have a lot of self doubts. I went through several advisors, topics, and research labs before I graduated age 34. Maybe I did everything wrong. Yet, some people believe that I am a successful researcher. How did I trick people? This is a talk about how to build a shrine to yourself.

Bio
Laura Dietz is a post-doctoral researcher / research scientist working with Bruce Croft at the Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval (CIIR) at the University of Massachusetts. Before that she was working with Andrew McCallum. She obtained her doctoral degree with a thesis on topic models for networked data from Max Planck Institute for Informatik in early 2011, being supervised by Tobias Scheffer and Gerhard Weikum. Between Masters and PhD, she worked at a Fraunhofer Institute until it got shut down. She worked on her PhD in Darmstadt, Berlin, Saarbruecken, Cambridge (UK), and Amherst.

35 members attended, including undergraduate students, graduate students, faculty, research scientists, and staff.

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emma tosch won best paper award at

11/24/2014

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The 4th year Ph.D. Student, Emma Tosch, won a Best Paper award at OOPSLA 2014, for her work on “Surveyman,” a first-of-its-kind software system for designing, deploying and automatically debugging surveys to improve their accuracy and trustworthiness. This is a huge honor especially given that OOPSLA is one of the top-tier conferences in the programming language research field! Her Surveyman work also won first place at the PLDI Student Research Competition.

Tosch's advisor, professor Emery Berger, says, “Poor quality data can be seriously misleading. Flaws in survey design and deployment threaten the validity of results, making them untrustworthy. Until now, there has been no way to address these shortcomings automatically. But Surveyman, which is a free, publicly available and revolutionary new tool, can identify problems in any survey from the design stage onward. It should completely change the way people create surveys.”

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lunch with jennifer chayes

11/24/2014

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Our second CS Women group lunch had Jennifer Chayes, a head of Microsoft Research in New England and NYC, who was visiting UMass as a DLS speaker. It was funny as we were casually talking to Jennifer in the beginning, one of our students asked, "So do you work in MSR?" and she said, "Well, I run it. :) "

Needless to say that she was a wonderful woman who was nice, friendly, charismatic and inspiring, we had a lot of fruitful discussions that even led our usual lunch time running longer than the usual. I will try to recap the discussions we had today.

stereotype threat: whistling vivaldi

As Shiri brought up one of the sessions provided at GHC that was about stereotype threat, Jennifer introduced one interesting story called 'Whistling Vivaldi' from a book that she recently read. It was a story about this guy named Claude Steele, who was an African-American student at University of Chicago. He noticed that every time he walks by the street, he realized that other people viewed him as some other outsider that they should be afraid of, rather than as one of them. He thought about what he can do to make them view him as the same member of the community, he started whistling Vivaldi's music whenever he walks around, and it worked. People who heard the whistle stopped viewing him differently. Then what can we do to deal with such stereotype threats in our cases? What would be our "Vivaldi Whistling" as minority women in mathematics and technology?

Jennifer also explained to us that in the book, the author asserted that in order to reduce the negative effects of stereotype, a mentor/advisor/boss's role is also very important. His advisor viewed him as a capable and competent individual rather than a minority black student, and that helped him feel secure and confident, which essentially led him to show better performance. This sounded like a message that can be useful for faculty too. I personally have the best advisor I can ever ask for, so I completely understood what the author meant by that.

satya's mistake at ghc

We also talked about what happened to Satya, the Microsoft CEO, at GHC. He recently had a lot of criticism by saying that it's better not to ask for raise for a better karma for a question that how women should ask for raise. There were so many news articles that spotlight his rather careless remark and when the heat went up, there were people who asserted that Satya should resign. Microsoft's stock dropped 6% that day.

Jennifer said that given that he apologized immediately later, it looked like an innocent mistake, that he was probably thinking about the time back then he didn't ask for his raise. But most importantly, she expressed her worries that because of his slip and harsh criticism that follows, this would make other males afraid and shy about coming to places like GHC and speak. Because people go home changed at places like GHC. It's very different than reading about these issues at home but seeing, talking, and interacting with these women and listening to the real problems. We want more males to come to GHC and go home changed, and it's truly important to have male allies to make changes together.

we need male allies!

The discussion shifted to the importance of having male allies. It's so much easier to make changes if they spoke for women too. In her case, her husband Christian Borgs, who is also a managing director of MSR New England and sincerely cares about these issues, helped making many changes to hire more women researcher in the center. So instead of treating other male workers as "enemies" who probably act upon an implicit biases rather than malicious intentions, helping them to see the problems and incorporating them as our allies is a very important issue.

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Grace Hopper Celebration Experiences, Part I

Invited Speaker: Valerie Barr

Teacher Training for Technical Skills Workshops

First Lunch Features Prof. Alexandra Meliou

Second Annual Ice Cream Social a Success!

Third lunch talk with Visitors from BBN

Second Lunch of the Semester Brings Audrey St. John

First Lunch of the Semester Features Research Scientist Laura Dietz

emma tosch won best paper award at

lunch with jennifer chayes

stereotype threat: whistling vivaldi

satya's mistake at ghc

we need male allies!

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