The ACM India Celebration of Women in Computing (AICWiC) http://www.aicwic2017.com held September 11-13 was hosted by the ACM-W Chennai Chapter and the School of Computing at SRM University. The Lady Ada Final Programming competition supported by ReliScore had more than 1,000 female participants across India. The winners were congratulated by Mukund Madhavan, President, ACM India and Arati M. Dixit, Chair, ACM-W India.
At an inaugural ACM-W India chapter summit, there was an enthusiastic discussion on how to start an ACM-W Chapter and the possible events that can be organized for encouraging and empowering women talent in computing. Talks focused on “How Women Empowerment Can Be Done through ACM- W Chapters” and “How Can Computing Technology Reach Girls in Rural Areas.”
Tutorials instructed attendees on “Web Application Development Using Hibernate with Spring MVC” and “Deep Learning.”
Gargi B. Dasgupta, senior research manager at IBM Research India, delivered a keynote speech on “Cognitive Technologies and Their Applications.” She talked about the technology components in conversational chatbots that help in automated understanding of natural language queries, automated response generation and knowledge extraction for driving the conversation. Dixit delivered a talk on “Dawn of Women in Computing: A Turing Award Perspective.” Her talk focused on women Turing award winners with an extensive discussion of the work of Silvio Micali and Shafi Goldwasser, 2012 Turing award recipients. Tracy Camp, professor, Colorado School of Mines, gave a Skype talk on “Implementing a Wireless Geophysical Sensor Network,” focusing on designing an efficient wireless sensor network capable of real-time continuous geophysical monitoring, which requires a more intelligent approach than a naïve “sense and store” method.
After a lunchtime poster presentation, the celebration ended with an exciting panel discussion on “Road Ahead for Women in Computing Research.”
