2016 Diversity Summit

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2016 Diversity in Computing Summit

Date:  November 7, 2016

Location:  Chesapeake Ballroom, College Park Marriott Hotel and Conference Center, Hyattsville, MD

Register Using Eventbrite Here

Maryland Center for Women in Computing is pleased to present our inaugural Diversity in Computing Summit, a one-day workshop designed for all advocates of underrepresented groups in computing fields. Through informative workshops and dynamic speakers, we will emphasize inclusive computing--efforts that address the positive impact that underrepresented groups have and will continue to have on the future of technology.

 

Purpose

Maryland Center for Women in Computing presents the

Diversity in Computing Summit

Maryland Center for Women in Computing is pleased to present our 2nd annual Diversity in Computing Summit, a one-day workshop designed for all advocates of underrepresented groups in computing fields. Through informative workshops and dynamic speakers, we will emphasize inclusive computing--efforts that address the positive impact that underrepresented groups have and will continue to have on the future of technology. 

The mission of the Summit is to bring together various partners in progress, whether they be students, professionals, HR specialists, career development experts, diversity advocates, policymakers or thought leaders in industry and academia to:

Celebrate
the diversity within computing

Create
awareness for the need to support computing professionals from underrepresented populations

Inspire
the current and next generation of computer scientists to be more inclusive

Build
relationships with partners and thought leaders from multiple discplines

Share
initiatives and best practices to support inclusion efforts in computing

Our partners are already contributing to progress and inclusive computing through a variety of programs and initiatives:

  • Many corporations have instituted diversity hiring initiatives and support special interest groups to celebrate and support underrepresented populations;
  • Universities support student organizations, academic centers, and activities to promote diversity;
  • Private and public organizations continually work to expand the pipeline of people interested in computing through educational and enrichment activities.

This Summit will provide our partners with an opportunity to learn from one another and showcase their efforts to make computing more inclusive and welcoming through panels, keynotes, table topics, and workshops.

By learning more about the positive impact diversity has on education, corporate culture, innovation, and emerging technologies, participants of the summit will leave with knowledge, tools, and community needed to support underrepresented people in computing communities.

We invite you to partner with us to celebrate and promote diversity in computing!

Interested in volunteering, attending, speaking, or just being a part of the Summit? Complete this form and someone will be in touch with you about opportunites.

For general questions about the Summit, please contact Kate Atchison, mcwic@cs.umd.edu To learn more about becoming a sponsor or exhibitor, please contact Maria Johnson, mjohn@cs.umd.edu

All proceeds of the Summit will be used to support the programs of the Maryland Center for Women in Computing. To learn more about the programs and resources of the MCWIC visit our website.

Featured Guests

Ruthe Farmer

Ruthe Farmer

Ruthe Farmer has focused her efforts on diversity and inclusion in technology and engineering since 2001. She currently serves as Senior Policy Advisor for Tech Inclusion at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy focusing on President Obama’s call to action for Computer Science for All and other tech related initiatives. Over the course of her career, Ms. Farmer has successfully launched and scaled up multiple national programs including Intel Design & Discovery, LEGO Robotics for Girl Scouts, NCWIT Aspirations in Computing, the TECHNOLOchicas campaign for Latinas in technology, the AspireIT computing outreach program, and more. She served as the 2012 Chair of Computer Science Education Week, was named a White House Champion of Change for Technology Inclusion in 2013, received the Anita Borg Institute Award for Social Impact in 2014, and the Education UK Alumni Award for Social Impact in 2015. She has been a guest contributor for TechCrunch and the Shriver Report, and has been featured in Forbes and TechRepublic for her work. Ruthe holds a BA from Lewis & Clark College and an MBA in Social Entrepreneurship from the Oxford University’s Said Business School and is passionate about integrating innovative business strategies into social change efforts.

Chris Stephenson

Chris Stephenson

Dr. Chris Stephenson is the Head of Computer Science Education Programs at Google where she works in the Education Research team. Stephenson leads the strategy and execution for computer science education projects, collaborating closely with internal Google teams and external computer science organizations. From 2004 to 2014, Stephenson was the founding Executive Director of the Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA), a professional membership organization of 22,000 educators dedicated to improving K-12 computing education. From 2000-2012 she served as the chair of the annual CSTA Conference and as the Computer Science Curriculum Advisor for Learning & Leading with Technology magazine. Stephenson has chaired the ACM K-12 Task Force and served as president of the International Society for Technology in Education’s Special Interest Group for Computer Science. Stephenson has numerous research publications in the field of computer science education and has written several high school textbooks on computer science and computer engineering. Stephenson serves on the ACM Education Board, the ACM Education Policy Committee and is a Senior Member of ACM.

 

Schedule and Sessions

Schedule of Events

Tentative Schedule

8:00-9:00
Registration/ Exhibitor Hall Preview 
9:00-9:15
Welcome/Intro
9:15-9:45
Keynote Address-Abigail Lewis
9:45-10:30
Breakout Session 1-Various Room
10:45-11:30
Breakout Session 2-Various Rooms
11:45
Lunch Served
12:00-1:00
Table Topics
1:15-2:00
Breakout Session 3-Various Rooms
2:15-2:45
Plenary Speaker- Sec. Kelly Schulz
2:45-3:00
Thank You/Wrap-up
3:00-5:00
Exhibitor/Career Fair Open
3:00-5:00
Networking Reception with Current Computer Science Undergraduate and Graduate Students

Breakout Sessions

Breakout Sessions will follow 4 tracks: Developing a Diverse Corporate Culture, Emerging Technology, The Future of Computing: Trends in Policy and Outreach, and Career Development and Personal Advocacy.

Career Development and Personal Advocacy

From newbies to mid level coders, it's a difficult thing to be a female software engineer sometimes - whether it's in a large corporation or a startup.

Sometimes it's hard being female in a man's world, but we are incredibly competent and very talented at what we do.

Join our paneliist as they share experience and insight from their years in the technical field. Learn more about how to stand out, be you, and thrive in the workplace. 

Presented By:

New to tech? Fresh out of a bootcamp? Want that first sweet gig? Transitioning your career can be extremely challenging not to mention terrifying! Publishing your sites to GitHub pages gets your code seen and your name out there.Getting involved with git and open source projects can be intimidating and in this talk, we will go over how to publish code with GitHub Pages and practice maintaining a project before jumping into an open source project. We will discuss now to get all those homework problems up on your GH-pages profile and start building a clean, available portfolio to send potential employers. As a bootcamp grad and with successful career change, I understand the hesitation and fear in putting your code out here, this talk will help with both the technical aspects of setting up your GH-Pages portfolio AND some of the emotional barriers to making the jump into tech!

Presented By:

This talk will discuss the tenets of user experience design and how they relate to the theory of intersectional feminism. Feminist topics such as the gender wage gap, and sexual harassment, and diversity in tech will be discussed, addressing how user experience design can help generate solutions to these problems.

Presented By:

It's Not All About You  

  During our lifetime, many of us have felt like an imposter or believed we are not good enough.  How does that happen?  How do we beat the Imposter Syndrome and not join "The I'm Not Good Enough Club.”  Shifting our focus away from ourselves and onto what it is we want and finding people who will help us achieve our goals, helps us break away from these limiting thoughts to achieve our dreams. We are social animals.  We need community and we need to surround ourselves with people who will cheer us on, help us explore and open doors.  How do you find these people?  

Presented By:

This interactive session will address the importance of mentors in professional development for computing professionals from diverse backgrounds, focusing both on how mentors can provide support and encouragement, and on how mentees can make the most of the mentoring relationship. This will include a presentation on best practices for mentoring, a small-group discussion about mentoring success and challenges and a Q & A session.

Presented By:

Have you ever been so shocked by gender imbalance that you've counted the number of men and women in a classroom, meeting, or even social event? Fifteen men and three woman; twenty men and two women; twenty­-five men and me. In this session, I'll present tips and tricks for thriving in such an imbalanced workplace that I developed in graduate school (in my first year, 20 men and three women) and in my first job at a start­up (when I started, 30 men and two women). Bring your own struggles and experiences to share with the group so that we may all be successful in this all-too-common workplace environment.

Developing a Diverse Corporate Culture

Presented By:

Part of having a diverse and inclusive environment is keeping your workforce. This workshop is meant for people of color, women, LGBTQ and their allies to come and produce a 'manual' that discusses practices that are not conducive to maintaining the diversity tech needs. Join Mark to create a 'working document' (our 95 Theses) that lists how we believe companies/institutions can create an inclusive, welcoming, and supportive environment from the ground up.

The tech industry suffers from an imbalance: companies are having a difficult time recruiting and retaining talent of varied genders, races, academic backgrounds, and experiences to make the tech industry representative of the users it serves.  As members of the tech industry, we have the power to serve as change agents, regardless of the position we hold in our company, to create an inclusive environment in tech.

If you were put in a situation where a tech imbalance was impacting the functionality of your team or your company, how would you react?  Let's dive into real life scenarios in this interactive workshop and figure out what the problem presented is, what needs to change, and how we can change it - regardless of your seniority level at the company.

Participants will leave the workshop armed with solutions and tools to advocate for themselves, help build a balanced tech industry, and celebrate their uniqueness as they move forward in their career.

Presented By:

Industry leaders and recruiters bemoan the difficulty in recruiting diverse and competitive 'tech talent'. The tech sector still has yet to figure out how to approach diversity in recruiting while depressing statistics come out everyday about companies percentage of women and minorities in tech departments. This session will cover how companies can recruit diverse talent by partnering with tech bootcamps to explore alternative pipelines for talent. 

Presented By:

In this session we will address common barriers to success for women in technology and address issues that must be touched in order to enable cultural change (policy- pipeline- and advocacy).

Together with the group we will build a potential survey for employees the answers to which will provide a starting place for culture realignment planning. Attendees will be encouraged to answer their survey honestly and use it to work toward change in their corporate culture.

They will also identify personnel in their company who they think can help them to implement these changes. We will also talk about engagement- policy adjustments- and the importance of visibility.

Presented By:

Women are underrepresented in high tech and leave at a rate 30% higher than men. In response, companies are taking recruiting steps. However, to retain women we must know the aspects of daily life they need to thrive. In this session the facilitator will share a framework defining dimensions of work life based on qualitative and quantitative research. Karen will share her intervention ideas and engage participants in a discussion of their experience and their thoughts on how to address these issues.

Presented By:

The tech sector is overdue in increasing diversity in gender, race, age, economic background, and educational background. Building an inclusive workplace is not just the right thing to do; it is the economically smart thing to do. Expand your definition of diversity and learn how building community partnerships and pathways for underrepresented talent can transform the tech workforce.

Emerging Technology

 

In this session,  UMD faculty will highlight research conducted at the University of Maryland around Data Science and Artificial Intellence and its impact on bias. Come learn how UMD researchers are looking at:

Natural Language Processing that aims to break language barriers and enable access to information and communication in a wide range of languages.  Bias, fairness and representation in genomic data science

 

Presented By:

New to tech? Fresh out of a bootcamp? Want that first sweet gig? Transitioning your career can be extremely challenging not to mention terrifying! Publishing your sites to GitHub pages gets your code seen and your name out there.Getting involved with git and open source projects can be intimidating and in this talk, we will go over how to publish code with GitHub Pages and practice maintaining a project before jumping into an open source project. We will discuss now to get all those homework problems up on your GH-pages profile and start building a clean, available portfolio to send potential employers. As a bootcamp grad and with successful career change, I understand the hesitation and fear in putting your code out here, this talk will help with both the technical aspects of setting up your GH-Pages portfolio AND some of the emotional barriers to making the jump into tech!

Presented By:

This talk will discuss the tenets of user experience design and how they relate to the theory of intersectional feminism. Feminist topics such as the gender wage gap, and sexual harassment, and diversity in tech will be discussed, addressing how user experience design can help generate solutions to these problems.

Presented By:

Join the Human Computer Interaction Lab (HCIL) at the University of Maryland  as they address interactive computational tools for accessibility.

 

The over 56 million people with disabilities in the US are disproportionately affected by inaccessible transportation, built infrastructure, and technology. In some cases, these barriers are an inconvenient nuisance—in others, they have dramatic impacts on a person's ability to live independently. In this session, we talk about how interactive computational tools are paving the way for making the world accessible. We present our efforts in addressing several accessibility challenges in the domains of transportation, health and wellness, and Activities of Daily Living (ADLs). We hope that getting a taste of what we can do with technology will inspire many more efforts to make the world truly accessible.

 

Speakers:

Manaswi Saha - Project Sidewalk

Ladan Najafizadeh - Temporal tracking of accessibility features in urban areas

Meethu Malu - Health and fitness tracking for mobility impaired users

Lee Stearns - Haptic and auditory guidance to assist visually impaired users

Meena Sengottuvelu - Using HoloLens for assisting people with low vision

The Future of Computing:Trends in Policy and Outreach

Presented By:

This session will discuss the BRAID Initiative and present preliminary findings from the UCLA BRAID Research Project. The BRAID initiative involves fifteen computer science departments across the U.S. (including UMD) that are committed to implementing changes to their introductory computer science courses, pathways into the major, departmental climate, and outreach efforts in hopes of increasing the recruitment and retention of women and underrepresented minority (URM) students in the computer science major. To document the results of the BRAID initiative and identify best practices, the UCLA-based BRAID research team is conducting a mixed-methods, longitudinal study of the BRAID initiative. The BRAID research team is collecting data from students, faculty, staff, department chairs, and administrators in order to answer a variety of research questions related the departmental change process and best practices for attracting and retaining women and URM students to the CS major.

Presented By:

Join in the discussion of Exploring Computer Science (ECS) and AP Computer Science Principles (APCSP) curriculum and framework, and the role of computer science in education equity

Presented By:

Industry leaders and recruiters bemoan the difficulty in recruiting diverse and competitive 'tech talent'. The tech sector still has yet to figure out how to approach diversity in recruiting while depressing statistics come out everyday about companies percentage of women and minorities in tech departments. This session will cover how companies can recruit diverse talent by partnering with tech bootcamps to explore alternative pipelines for talent. 

Presented By:

Women in the US are a minority when it comes to competing in STEM. They are seldom seen as leading technical developers and data scientists. The environment is changing: education systems, government, and non-profits have identified this gender gap.  In contrast, the support for building female data scientists are nearly neglected in developing countries. The mission is to create a foundation, a network of resources, and a community for women to build data science skills. Most recently, I was on a team which built a community of female coders in Accra, Ghana. Developing data science among women in difficult environments will equip them to thrive in these at-risk markets. In turn, the women will be able build internal programs to serve their local community needs. New skill sets and leadership qualities will create female leaders, leading to an improvement in their quality of life. Drawing from insights gained from training women in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Ghana, and Haiti - the results indicate an environment ripe for data science, but with little resources to foster the advancement of this skill set. The model developed and lessons learned can be applied to many countries.

 

Thank you to our Sponsors

Advocates

 

Exhibitors

 
 
 
 

UMD Partners & Organizations

College of Computer, Mathematical and Natural Sciences
UMIACS
Department of Computer Science
 
AWC
Code Black
CS Latino
 
Technica

Community Organizations

DCFemTech
WSC

 

Register to Attend

Participant Information

Hotel

If you are traveling from out of town, we have arranged accommodations at our host site the College Park Marriott. The group rate of $185 is available on November 6th & 7th . To book your rate, visit this link or call 301-985-7300. Rooms should be booked by October 8.

Schedule

The schedule can be viewed from aboved. Breakout sessions will be divided into 3 groups of about 6 sessions each. Specific times will be released later in October. 

Exhibitor Hall

The Exhibitor Hall will open at 8:45am for a preview of the booths. It will be opened throughout the event, but we expected most attendees to visit during breaks, lunch, and during the  the networking reception. View the list of exhibitors under the sponsors tab.

Parking and Transportation 

Complimentary parking is available at the College Park Marriott Hotel and Conference Center.

The College Park Metro and Greenbelt Metro stations are in the area, but are not considered walkable. Shuttle UMD service is available from College Park Metro.  Metrobus and taxicabs are available from both stations.

Meals

  • Refreshments will be provided during morning and afternoon breaks.
  • A hot buffet lunch will be served during round table topics.
  • Light h'orderves will be served during the networking reception.

Resume Database

Are you looking for your next opportunity? Share your resume with the sponsors and exhibitors by completing this form: http://go.umd.edu/csresumedatabase

By emailing your resume, you give the Maryland Center for Women in Computing permission to share your resume with confirmed sponsors and exhibitors of the conference. If you would like your resume removed at anytime, please email: mcwic@cs.umd.edu with the headline Diversity Summit Resume Database.