Portland, Oregon, USA-The Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing Conference, held April 1-4, 2009 in Portland, Oregon was the most successful conference in the history of the event, according to Pam Williams of LMI, chair of the Coalition to Diversify Computing (CDC). The CDC, a joint organization of the Association for Computing Machinery, Computing Research Association, and IEEE Computer Society, organizes the conference.

The conference set a new record for attendance: nearly 400 attendees from academia, industry, and government participated in this year's event, including 249 students and 73 faculty members representing 101 universities and colleges. Additionally, over 20 companies and research institutions participated in the conference. Industry, academic, and government supporters provided scholarships to 141 students in attendance.

At the conference awards ceremony, Dr. Ann Quiroz Gates was presented with the Richard A. Tapia Achievement Award for Scientific Scholarship, Civic Science, and Diversifying Computing. The Tapia award recognizes an individual with outstanding achievements in scientific scholarship, a strong civic presence within the scientific community, and a dedication to the attainment of true ethnic diversity in computing and related disciplines. Dr. Gates is the Associate Vice President for Research at the University of Texas at El Paso and past chair of the Department of Computer Science. She directs the NSF-funded Cyber-ShARE Center that focuses on developing and sharing resources through cyber-infrastructure to advance research and education in science, and she leads the Computing Alliance for Hispanic-Serving Institutions (CAHSI), an NSF-funded consortium that is focused on the recruitment, retention, and advancement of Hispanics in computing.

Awards were also given to the student Robotics Competition winner and to six student research posters presented at the conference. Harvey Mudd College's "import antigravity" team won the Robotics Competition for the second year in a row. The team members, all sophomores, were Zachary Dodds, Becky Green, Sabreen Lakhani, Pam Strom, and Kate Burgers. As part of the competition, teams from around the country were required to qualify for entry. Prior to coming to the conference, each team programmed a robot to enable it to seek out objects in a rendered environment. During the conference competition, the robots were required to locate objects in an environment created at expressly for this competition.

The poster competition included an impressive quality of quality of presentations, particularly from the undergraduates, many of which were presenting at their first conference, according to Chuck Koelbel, Rice University, Posters Co-chair. "Appropriate for the Tapia conference, we had a very diverse group of posters, technically, from networking through weather modeling to education; geographically, from New York to the deep South; and demographically all sizes, shapes, and colors," said Brandeis Marshall, Purdue University, Posters Co-chair.

The poster competition winners were:

Graduate Students
1st place - Pramita Mitra, University of Notre Dame (with Christian Poellabauer) - "On Improving Performance and Reliability of Location Aware Routing in Asymmetric Networks"
2nd place - Charles Lively, Texas A&M University (with Valerie Taylor, Sadaf R Alam, Heike Jagode and Jeffrey S Vetter) - "Using Hierarchical Models to Identify Optimal Task Placement on Multi-core Cluster Systems"
3rd place - Damon McCoy, University of Colorado at Boulder (with Ben Greenstein, Jeffrey Pang, Yoshi Kohno, Srinivasan Seshan and David Wetherall) - Improving Wireless Privacy with an Identifier-Free Link Layer Protocol"

Undergraduate Students
1st place - Kwame-Lante Wright, The Cooper Union (with Jian Wang and Kartik Gopalan) - "XenLoop: A Tranparent High Performance Inter-VM Network Loopback"
2nd place - Katelyn Doran UNC Charlotte - "EleMental: The Recurrence"
3rd place - Samantha Finkelstein, UNC Charlotte (with Andrea Nickel, Lane Harrison and Tiffany Barnes) - "cMotion: Using Emotion Recognition to Teach Autistic Children Programming Syntax"

First, second, and third place winners in each category will receive checks for $1000, $500, and $250 respectively and were will also be entered into the ACM Grand Finals for the Student Research Competition to be held online.

The next Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing Conference will be held in 2011; to sign up for announcements about the 2011 event, write to info@tapiaconference.org.

About the Tapia Conference

The Tapia Celebration is organized by the Coalition to Diversify Computing (CDC), and sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in cooperation with the Computing Research Association (CRA) and the IEEE Computer Society (IEEE-CS). The CDC (http://www.cdc-computing.org/) is a joint organization of the ACM, CRA, and IEEE-CS.

The conference honors the significant contributions of Dr. Richard A. Tapia, University Professor and Maxfield-Oshman Professor in Engineering in the Department of Computational and Applied Mathematics and Director of the Center for Excellence and Equity in Education at Rice University in Houston, Texas.

The Tapia 2009 Celebration is made possible by the financial support of a number of academic, research, and business organizations at several levels, including:

--Platinum Supporter: National Science Foundation

--Gold Supporters: Empowering Leadership Alliance, Rice-Houston Alliance for Graduate Education and the Professoriate

--Silver Supporters: Google, Microsoft, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

--Bronze Supporters: Georgetown University, Harvey Mudd College, IBM Corporation, Indiana University, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Oregon State University, Rochester Institute of Technology, Symantec Corporation, Tufts University, University of Notre Dame

--Contributors: Anita Borg Institute, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, National Center for Women & Information Technology, University of Texas at Austin