The CRA Distinguished Service Award is presented to a person or multiple people who have made an outstanding service contribution to the computing research community. The CRA A. Nico Habermann Award is presented to a person or multiple people who have made outstanding contributions aimed at increasing the numbers and/or successes of underrepresented groups in the computing research community.
CRA has recently hired Alejandra Guzman as a program associate. In this role, Alejandra supports CRA and CRA-W program activities with meeting planning, workshops, outreach activities, and committee support.
Alejandra graduated from Brown University in 2015 with an Education Studies degree. During her undergraduate career, she was deeply involved with student organizations that supported underrepresented student communities such as first-gen, low income, etc.
She has continued that work in her professional career as she supports disenfranchised students, particularly in STEM fields. Before joining CRA, Alejandra promoted computer science learning through Code Success, a Google-sponsored program at the National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE), which focused on enhancing NSBE members’ CS technical skills as well as professional skills to ensure they were job ready upon graduation. In her free time, Alejandra enjoys spending time with her family, reading, running and playing with her cat.
CRA and CRA-W Board Member Ayanna Howard was recently named the recipient of the 2018 Richard A. Tapia Achievement Award for Scientific Scholarship, Civic Science and Diversifying Computing from the Center for Minorities and People with Disabilities in Information Technology (CMD-IT). The Richard A. Tapia Award is awarded annually to an individual who demonstrates significant research leadership and strong commitment and contributions to diversifying computing.
Apply today to attend the early or mid career mentoring workshops to be held November 3-4 in Phoenix, AZ. The goal of these workshops is to provide an environment for mentoring, practical information, advice, and support among computing researchers.
Recently, Nancy Amato, a robotics expert and CRA-W board member, was selected to lead the University of Illinois Department of Computer Science. She will be the first woman to hold this position at the University. Congratulations Nancy!
Speaker: Sanjana Sahayaraj
Research Presentation: Exploring NLP Techniques to Help Build Medical Decision Support Systems
Natural Language Processing research is intense. But there’s still a lot of gaps that need to be filled and automated techniques that need to be developed when it comes to processing textual data generated during medical treatments. Examples of such documents are discharge summaries, pathological reports, etc., and we still need to develop robust techniques to extract useful information from these documents to arrive at useful answers and insights. These insights can in turn help doctors plan their course of action and make decisions.
The CRA-W GHC Research Scholars program brings undergraduate women to the annual Grace Hopper Celebration. The purpose of this program is to give attendees a unique experience at GHC by connecting students with mentors, and providing additional networking opportunities and advising sessions.
CRA-W recently announced two recipients of the 2018 Borg Early Career Award (BECA) – Reetuparna Das and Yejin Choi. he award honors the late Anita Borg, who was an early member of CRA-W, and is inspired by her commitment to increasing the participation of women in computing research. The annual award is given to women in computer science and/or engineering who have made significant research contributions and contributed to the profession, especially in the outreach to women. Learn more about the 2018 recipients in this article.
Susan Eggers recently received the 2018 ACM-IEEE-CS Eckert-Mauchly Award, “for outstanding contributions to simultaneous multithreaded processor architectures and multiprocessor sharing and coherency.” This is a significant milestone in computer architecture because she is the first woman to receive the award in its 39-year history.
Eggars accepted the award at the ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA) and delivered a moving acceptance speech. She has also inspired several women to stay in the field and served as a mentor at many CRA-W Career Mentoring Workshops.
