Media contact: Jon Bashor, jbashor@lbl.gov, 510-501-2230

2011 Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing Conference
Posts All-Time Registration Record

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif.—For the first time in its 10-year history, the Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing Conference has registered more than 500 attendees, leading organizers to close registration a week before the April 3-5 conference begins.

Marking the 10th anniversary of the first Tapia conference, Tapia 2011 is centered around a series of presentations by distinguished speakers from industry and academia. The conference program also features professional development sessions, panel discussions, a student research poster session and opportunities for students to learn about career options.

The Tapia conference has a tradition of 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.

“This unprecedented level of advance registration is gratifying in that the Tapia conference plays such an important role in supporting students in under-represented groups. In addition, we think the record attendance is a positive reaction to the many innovations that we are trying for the first time in Tapia 2011. Nevertheless, this response also shows that the need for such a valuable forum outstrips what is available,”  said 2011 Tapia General Chair David Patterson, a professor of computer science at the University of California at Berkeley and former president of the ACM, the society sponsoring the Tapia conference. “We would love to have more attendees, but our hotel facilities simply can’t handle any more people.”

Of those registered, about 75 percent are students, more than 50 percent are women and more than 70 percent are from other under-represented groups, including African Americans, Native Americans, Hispanics or Latinos.

“Tapia 2011 is truly going to be a celebration of diversity in computing,” said conference Deputy Chair Juan Vargas of Microsoft. “The organizing committee has worked hard to create a program that is inspiring and motivational and it’s great to see that the community is responding so strongly. That’s what this is all about.”

Tapia 2011 is sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery and organized by the Coalition to Diversify Computing in cooperation with the Computing Research Association and the IEEE Computer Society.

About the Tapia Conference
           The Tapia conference honors the significant contributions of Richard A. Tapia, a mathematician and professor in the Department of Computational and Applied Mathematics at Rice University in Houston, Texas, and a national leader in education and outreach programs. The Tapia Conferences brings together people in CS&E from all educational levels, backgrounds and ethnicities to celebrate and support the accomplishments of this diverse community.

The Tapia conference series enjoys the support of a number of academic, research and business organizations, including:

Platinum supporters: Google and National Science Foundation
Gold supporter: Intel
Gold academic supporters: California State University, Stanislaus, Georgia Tech, Rice University, Texas A&M University, University of California at Berkeley, University of Texas at Austin and Virginia Tech.
Silver supporters: Cisco, Microsoft and NetApp
Silver academic supporter: Radford University.
Bronze supporters: IBM, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Oracle, Symantec Corp.
Contributors: Amazon.com, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, National Center for Atmospheric Research Computational and Information Systems Laboratory, National Center for Women & IT, National Security Agency, SAP, TeraGrid and Yahoo!

For more information about the conference, visit the Tapia 2011 conference website.