This October 14-17, 2007 more than 400 students, professors, and researchers will gather at the Disney Hilton in Orlando, Florida for the fourth Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing Conference. Held every two years, the Tapia Conference provides a welcoming and supportive setting for all participants and particularly for students and faculty from under-represented groups.

The Tapia Conference is aimed at providing a supportive networking environment for under-represented groups across the broad range of computing and information technology, from science to business to the arts to infrastructure.

The 2007 Conference will include several successful aspects of past events, such as:

• A robust technical program, which includes papers, workshops, panels, and birds-of-a-feather sessions.
• Invited plenary talks that feature the voices of our community who have excelled across different benchmarks and will discuss how they have organized their scientific and non-scientific ideas to find their niche and become successful.
• A dynamic poster session, focused on students, providing a place to present new, exciting research in a relatively informal, supportive setting. Winners of the poster competition will be eligible for ACM's Student Research Competition Grand Finals.
• The Doctorial Consortium, a full-day sounding board to guide and encourage students working on their Ph.D.s.
• Several opportunities to network, including the posters reception, breaks, and the gala awards banquet.

New this year, an exciting robotics competition will pit teams of students against each other as they send their programmed robots on "search and rescue" tasks in simulated and physical disaster environments that have applications in homeland security, national defense, and emergency management.

The Tapia Conference will be co-located with the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing Conference, which will take place October 17-20, also at the Disney Hilton.

We welcome your participation!