The 2014 ACM Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing Conference was held in Seattle, Washington, on February 5—8. The Tapia Conferences brings undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, researchers, and professionals in computing from all backgrounds and ethnicities together. This year's conference theme, "The Strength of Diversity," celebrated diversity in computing by connecting attendees with common backgrounds, ethnicities, disabilities, and gender with computing leaders in academia and industry. Conference attendance was over 625. Approximately 30 of that number were faculty, students and staff from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Texas A&M University.
CSE was a gold sponsor at this year's Tapia Conference. CSE's booth was abuzz with all the attendees. "We had sling bags that were filled with department materials, chap stick, post-it notes and pens that were given away," said Kathy Waskom, CSE engineering organizational services manager. "We handed out over 200 sling bags. We also had three daily raffles on each of the conference days in which we gave away polo's, t-shirts, TAMU mice (computer mouse), a signed book by Dr. Bjarne Stroustrup, and Aggieopoly."
One of our CSE students was invited to present her research at The Doctoral Consortium, a one-day workshop where doctoral students discussed their investigations with a panel of successful researchers. Chinwe Ekenna, a member of the Parasol Lab, presented "Adaptive Neighbor Connection for PRMs: A Natural Fit for Heterogeneous Environments and Parallelism."
CSE Interim Department Head Dr. Nancy N. Amato and Associate Professor Dr. Tracy Hammond spoke on undergraduate "survival skills" at the CRA-W/CDC Undergraduate Career Mentoring Workshop. Some of the topics covered during the workshop were finding technical internships, learning to network, resume writing, and getting into graduate school. Besides her role as speaker, Dr. Amato was co-chair of the CRA-W/CDC Workshops, which included Undergraduate Career Mentoring, Graduate Career Mentoring, and Mid-Career Mentoring.
The Tapia Conferences are organized by the Coalition to Diversify Computing, sponsored by the Association for Computing machinery, and presented by the Center for Minorities and People with Disabilities in Information Technology (CMD-IT). CMD-IT's executive director is our own Dr. Valerie Taylor. The Tapia Conferences are in cooperation with the Computing Research Association and the IEEE Computer Society.