| Program Highlights |
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Doctoral Consortium (by invitation only) The Doctoral Consortium provides an opportunity for Ph.D. students to discuss and explore their research interests and career objectives with a panel of established researchers in computing and in computational mathematics, science and engineering. Student and Scholarship Recipient Orientations At the Student and Scholarship Recipient Orientations, experience and suggestions will be offered to students toward maximizing the benefits of their participation in the Tapia 2007 conference and future professional activities. Scholarship Orientation Student Orientation
Opening Reception The Opening Reception offers a relaxed setting for the start of the conference. This is an opportune time to meet and network with colleagues, leaders in the field, and potential future collaborators. Conference participants will have an opportunity to meet honoree Richard Tapia, a host of speakers and panelists, representatives from our sponsors and supporters, conference organizers, and other conference participants.
Plenary Speakers It’s Not Just About the Machine! Diversity: A Weapon of Mass Construction kuhl-er-blahynd Luncheon Speakers Ken Kennedy Distinguished Lecture Banquet Speaker Plenary Speaker
Student Poster Presentations and Reception Poster Display and Reception Poster Semi-Finalist Oral Presentations The Tapia 2007 poster session is an opportunity for students to present their latest research results and methodologies to a wide conference audience and to network at the same time. This year, the posters competition is part of the ACM Student Research Competition (SRC). The top three posters in the graduate and undergraduate student categories will advance to the ACM SRC Grand Finals. The poster competition will take place in three stages. The first stage was submission of posters to the conference. Acceptance decisions were based on the relevance and importance of the problem, the correctness and contribution of the results reported, and the clarity of the presentation. The second stage is the Monday night poster session. Each author of an accepted poster will be assigned a space to display a printed research poster. These posters will remain up for the duration of the conference. On Monday evening, October 15, authors will present their posters in a reception attended by conference attendees and judges. The judges will have the opportunity to view the posters and talk to entrants about their work. The judges will then select the top five posters in the graduate and undergraduate categories as semi-finalists to advance to the third stage. The third stage will require that each semi-finalist give a 10-minute oral presentation of their work at a special conference session on Tuesday, October 16. Based on these presentations, the judges will select up to three graduates and three undergraduates as winners of the competition. First, second, and third place winners in each category will receive checks for $1000, $500, and $250 respectively. They will also be entered into the ACM Grand Finals for the Student Research Competition to be held online.
Robotics Competition Monday, October 15 6:00-9:00 p.m. Tuesday, October 16
At the celebratory banquet, good food and lively conversation will be followed by an invited talk by Maria Klawe and an awards ceremony. In addition to networking with a diverse group of students, faculty, researchers and practitioners from many areas, you will be able to socialize with a number of leaders in the field of computing in an informal setting. The evening will end with a DJ spinning music for dancing. Awards to be presented: The Richard A. Tapia Achievement Awards for Scientific Scholarship, Civic Science, and Diversifying Computing Ken Kennedy Distinguished Lecture Award Banquet Invited Presentation: Conversation, Music, and Dancing Closing Lunch and Town Hall Meeting Your help is needed with the planning of future events and programs related to increasing diversity in the field of computing. Voice your ideas or suggestions during the Town Hall Meeting, which will provide an open forum for discussions about future Tapia events as well as possible programs that can be undertaken by the Coalition to Diversify Computing, a joint organization of the ACM, CRA and IEEE-CS, which is open to ideas for new projects that aid in increasing the diversity in the field of computing, especially within graduate programs in computing. The Tapia Conference will be co-located with and bridge the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing 2007, which will be held October 17-20, 2007, in Orlando, Florida.
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| Speakers |
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At Tapia 2007, Malcom’s talk will contend “It’s Not Just About the Machine!” She states that “Information is power. So the ability to create and manage information is empowering. When diversity is not reflected in a community that fuels a knowledge and information driven world, the skills to solve problems are not available to large segments of the population. It is now possible to draw congressional maps in ways that enfranchise or disenfranchise large populations of people. We have moved from paper to electronic voting. We can remotely monitor and document acts of genocide. We can create wealth and support meaningful work. We can invade or protect privacy. Given all the potential power in the hands of computing professionals, we must work to ensure that this capacity is reflected in a more diverse profession and that the power and responsibilities are incorporated into the way computer science is practiced.” |
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In describing his talk entitled „kuhl-er-blahynd,” King notes that “Fewer than 50 percent of English words are spelled phonetically. Yet, some people are adamant that phonics is the only way to learn to read English. Ideology often trumps fact, and this shows up clearly with regard to racial and ethnic diversity. In the past two decades, U.S. discourse on race relations has made a curious shift, from acute color-awareness to a recent claim that everything will be solved if American society simply becomes ‘colorblind.’ Even if that was possible, would it be desirable? This talk uses the ideology of colorblindness to explore various ways people can be blind to facts.” |
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In her Tapia 2007 invited talk on “Mentoring across Race and Discipline,” Klawe will discuss how “As a female working at the boundary between mathematics and computer science, one of my life goals has been to increase the participation of women in science and engineering careers, especially in computer science and mathematics. Moving to the U.S. from Canada four and half years ago has given me the opportunity to become much more involved in mentoring minority students, some of whom have been working in areas I know little about. This talk explores some of the challenges and successes I have found in trying to translate approaches from mentoring women in my own field to mentoring students of color in many fields.” |
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At Tapia 2007, he will give a talk entitled “Diversity: A Weapon of Mass Construction.” In his presentation, Johnson will consider “How is it possible in 2007 that science and society have not come to a common understanding of the role of diversity in areas that deeply influence our lives—from ecologies to politics to the stock market? Socially we encourage diversity from at least an ethical viewpoint, if not from business argument. But then, our organizational actions emphasize the competitive origin of performance — ‘hire the best,’ ‘reward the achievers,’ ‘follow the strong’ — all of which are fundamentally destructive to diversity. To resolve these conflicting views, we will take a journey of discovery that illustrates how the different roles of diversity in achieving higher performance are just different stages of development in complex systems or different roles of leadership in a complex society. Optimism for the future is found in the synergy of diversity — the ultimate weapon of mass construction.” |
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Both of Dr. Tapia’s parents came to the United States from Mexico when they were children, seeking educational opportunities. Dr. Tapia was the first Hispanic elected to the National Academy of Engineering. He was appointed to the National Science Board in 1996 by President Clinton. He has also received the lifetime mentorship award of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the National Science Foundation’s Presidential Mentoring Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics, and Engineering. Two national conferences carry his name: The Blackwell-Tapia Conference and the Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing. Throughout his life Richard Tapia has been involved in competitive bicycle and car activities. In this presentation, composed of video segments with narration, he and his co-presenters share several experiences in which his mathematical training assisted him in appreciating, identifying, understanding, or solving a problem he encountered racing bikes or displaying a show car. Rice Ph.D. student Edward Gonzalez demonstrates how he used discrete optimization computation to solve the problem of assigning lanes fairly in bicycle motorcross (BMX) racing. Josef Sifuentes, also a Rice Ph.D. student, describes how he used computation to make a psychedelic video to accompany the showing of the award-winning Tapia ’70 Chevelle Heavy Metal at car shows across the country. The images were created using the nation’s largest supercomputer to perform numerical simulations of the Navier-Stokes partial differential equations that govern fluid flow in and around the car in the video. This presentation has been given to thousands of people across the country that initially believed that computational mathematics had nothing to do with their world. |
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Veloso researches in planning, control learning, and execution for multirobot teams. Her algorithms address uncertain, dynamic, and adversarial environments. With her students, Veloso has developed teams of robot soccer agents, which have been RoboCup world champions several times. Veloso is a Fellow of the American Association of Artificial Intelligence and President-Elect of the RoboCup International Federation. She was awarded an NSF Career Award in 1995 and the Allen Newell Medal for Excellence in Research in 1997. Veloso was Program Chair of the 2007 International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IJCAI'07, held in Hyderabad. Veloso is the author of one book on "Planning by Analogical Reasoning" and editor of several other books. She is also an author in more than 200 journal articles and conference papers. Her presentation, "Multi-Robot Intelligence" shows how robots are physical artifacts with a seamless integration of perception, cognition, and action. The presentation will be focused on teams of intelligent autonomous robots performing tasks in highly uncertain domains. Robots need to jointly assess the state of their environment, communicate with each other, make decisions, execute actions towards the achievement of team objectives, and learn from observation and feedback based on the outcome of their actions. |
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Her presentation, "Diversity is the Key to IT Security at Disney", highlights the fact that (whether in films, in its theme parks on three continents or its ability to completely captivate its audiences) the companies established by Walt Disney are renowned for their painstaking attention to even the smallest details. And our philosophy is no different when it comes to IT security at our theme parks and resorts. Protecting the personal information of our millions of visitors and tens of thousands of employees is critical to keeping the trust the organization has built up over 75 years. Achieving this goal requires an extremely talented and diverse team with both expertise and creativity. Together we have developed a collaborative, comprehensive and passionate approach that works so well, most people never even know about it. In this talk, I’ll provide a behind-the-scenes look at one of Disney’s most successful, but least known thrill rides – IT security. |
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