The 2015 Richard Tapia Conference, “Diversity at Scale”, was held Feb. 18-21 in Boston. About 800 people participated in the 2015 Celebration of Diversity.
Faculty and two staff members from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Texas A&M University were in attendance and hosted a booth, where they met other students, professors and industry professionals. About 20 computer science nd engineering students attended, with graduate student, Raniero Lara-Garduno winning first place in the Graduate Poster Contest at the conference. Dr. Tracy Hammond, director of the Sketch Recognition Lab and an associate professor in the department, is Lara-Garduno’s advisor.
“What my research entails is taking the sketch information that we capture digitally and performing sketch recognition on it to help determine new patient information that would otherwise be very difficult if not impossible to derive without using the power of modern computation,” Lara-Garduno said. “So far we can determine the age of a healthy patient as either "above 50" or "below 38" with up to 92 percent accuracy, which has never been determined before just by analyzing the patient sketch of a connect-the-dots exercise with no other information to go off of. It's a very promising finding that makes this a very exciting project in terms of helping develop a model of healthy patients so that we can provide neuropsychologists with vastly improved granularity of patient information made possibly only by sketch recognition algorithms in modern computing.”
Dr. Dilma Da Silva, head of the department, was the plenary speaker for the conference and Research Professor and TIAS Fellow Dr. Jack Dongarra was among the many speakers who presented at this year’s conference.
In Da Silva’s talk titled “The Challenges in Mobile Cloud Computing”, she discussed the key technical innovations and business aspects that enabled the broad adoption of cloud services in our industry, and highlighted the open technical problems being tackled by the academic and industrial research communities.
Dongarra’s talk was the Ken Kennedy Distinguished Lecture, and was titled “Algorithmic and Software Challenges when Moving Towards Exascale”. In his talk, he examined how high performance computing has changed over the last 10-year and look toward the future in terms of trends.
Other speakers included Freeman A. Hrabowski, III, the president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County; Odest Chadwicke Jenkins, associate professor of computer science at Brown University; Shaun Kane, assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Colorado Boulder; and Jacky Wright, vice president of Microsoft IT Strategic Enterprise Services,
The Richard Tapia Conference is presented by the Center for Minorities and People with Disabilities in Information Technology (CMD-IT) and is organized by the Coalition to Diversify Computing (CDC). CMD-IT is directed by Dr. Valerie E. Taylor, senior associate dean for academic affairs and Royce E. Wisenbaker Professor in Computer Science and Engineering at Texas A&M. Da Silva and Unocal Professor Dr. Nancy M. Amato are members of CDC.