AWICS Events

The workshop is on April 22nd from 11am to 2pm in Bright 302. Panelists from both academia and industry will be there to talk about their experiences.

This was scheduled for April the 9th at the Pebblecreek Country Club. All undergraduate and graduate students were invited to register to attend this banquet.

AWICS had an ice skating event for all members as well as friends and family. It was held at the Arctic Wolfe Ice Center at 400 Holleman Drive East in College Station, TX.

Schlumberger hosted an externship, open to undergraduate and graduate students. This involved a visit to their facilities in Houston and was a great opportunity to get to talk to engineers within the company and learn first-hand of their career opportunities.

Members of AWICS got together for a group rock climb at the Texas A&M Rec Center. It was a fun experience for everyone who joined us!

The workshop was on April the 4th from 10am to 2pm in Bright Building room 302. Panelists from both academia and industry told us about their experiences. We all had a chance to ask them questions. The workshop was a great success.

The members of AWICS got together for dinner at Shawna's house on Friday, March 23rd. Everyone brought something different to share and add to the menu for the potluck.

The mentors and mentees of AWICS met at Sweet Eugene's Coffee Shop for the Valentine's social on Friday, February 9th at 8:00 pm. Everyone played board games and chatted while enjoying some good coffee.

The mentoring officers of AWICS -Reetal Pai and Meg Davis organized a mentoring kickoff event on Friday the 17th starting at 6pm. This event was a way to get to know our mentors/mentees over a game of Putt-Putt golf and pizza. Each mentor and mentee pair played as a team and competed to win a gift card. The winners were the undergraduate team of Meg Davis, Tristan Closs, Jessica Gonzales, Irene, Sarah. The games and food was sponsored by the Google Ambassador program.

Cathy shared with us her experience of working as a vice president of Industry Solutions and Emerging Business for IBM Research.

Cathy is vice president of Industry Solutions and Emerging Business for IBM Research. Prior to this position, Cathy was vice president of global productivity and employee IT advocate in the chief information officer organization. Her focus was on improving and expanding the IT services, support and function to IBM's employees. She provided a single point of contact for managing contracts, operations and measurements with service providers, such as those with the IBM Global Account, AT&T, and others around the world.Cathy holds a bachelor of science degree in mathematics/computer science from State University of New York, Binghamton and master of business administration degree in finance from Iona College.

Carla talked about CRA and the programs they organize.

As the Director of Programs at CRA, Carla is involved with the broad range of programs focusing on human resources, on community-building, and on connecting CRA with the other organizations advancing science and engineering. She supports several CRA committees such as the Committee on the Status of Women in Computing Research (CRA-W), Coalition to Diversity Computing (CDC), the IT Deans Group, and others. A native of New Mexico and first-generation college graduate, Carla received her B.A. in English, pre-law at the University of New Mexico, and her M.P.A. at the University of Texas at El Paso. She uses some of her free time assisting grass roots non-profit organizations and Latino/a artists in the areas of marketing, public relations, and fundraising.

Valentina shared her experiences of being a contributor to the design and implementation of BlueGene -the fastest supercomputer in the world.

Dr. Salapura received MS degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of Zagreb, Croatia, and a PhD degree in Computer Science and Engineering from Technische University Wien in Vienna, Austria in 1996. She was Professor at the Dept. of Computer Engineering at Technische University Wien in Vienna, Austria before joining IBM Research at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in 2000.Valentina Salapura has received several corporate awards for her technical contributions.

Department's generous funding, combined with scholarships from the conference and volunteering, enabled us to bring a group of twenty two to the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing at San Diego, California. We were the largest group there and it was a great experience interacting with successful women from all parts of the world.

The Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing 2006 is the sixth in a series of conferences designed to bring the research and career interests of women in computing to the forefront. Presenters are leaders in their respective fields, representing industrial, academic and government communities. Leading researchers present their current work, while special sessions focus on the role of women in today's technology fields. Due to the dedication and participation of great technical women undergraduates and graduate students, developers and researchers, and business and technical leaders representing industry, academia and government the 2006 Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing conference, advanced the research and career interests of women in computing with overwhelming success. This conference is organized by Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology (ABI) and Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).

The new generics feature of .NET 2005 has gotten a lot of press but what's it actually good for? Walk through the syntax of generics and basic rules regarding their use, and then explore how to integrate them into your applications and architectures - both the new generic classes in the framework and your own generic classes. Learn how to design generic classes at the core of your infrastructure, and how to avoid dead ends where you think generics will do something that they won't. Ms. Dollard will compare, contrast, and combine generics and OOP models such as inheritance and interfaces to introduce the new architectural patterns available in .NET 2005, as well as clarifying details such as how and when to use the new generic collections and nullable classes.

Kathleen Dollard is a nationally recognized author, trainer, and speaker. Microsoft has honored her with its "Most Valuable Professional" award every year since 1998. INETA included her in its prestigious speaker's bureau. She's written numerous articles and "Code Generation in Microsoft .NET" (Apress, 2004). She also codes almost every day as a consultant or for her own company GenDotNet. Her passion is helping programmers be smarter in how they develop. She's currently working on full life cycle improvements, such as better debugging and capturing business intent in metadata and test definitions. She received her Masters of Science in Chemistry at Texas A&M in 1983. She moved full time from chemistry to computers at the dawn of the PC revolution while working in industry in the 1980's, and has been an independent consultant since 1989.

• AWICS Distinguished Lecture 4:10 p.m., Wednesday Sep 21, 2005



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Senior Security Architect, IBM/Tivoli Systems
Dr. Heather Hinton
April 17, 2006


As part of an (unwittingly?) varied career, I have had the opportunity to see all sides of the fence and how green the grass really is. I will spend a bit of time talking about being a grad student, an academic, and working in industry, Hopefully I can be honest about what I enjoy(ed) about each environment, what I couldn't stand (honestly) and how I worked around it (or didn't). Without sounding like your mother, I hope to provide some insights into each world. You can then take this information and use it - what are your missing skills? How do you go about getting them?

Dr. Hinton is a Senior Security Architect with Tivoli Systems (part of IBM Software Group) and is the lead architect for the Tivoli Federated Identity Management product. Dr. Hinton is a past Chair of the IEEE Technical Committee on Security and Privacy. She has served on numerous program committees, including acting as the General Chair of the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy. Prior to joining IBM in (late) 1999, Dr. Hinton was an assistant professor at Ryerson Polytechnic University in Toronto, where she also held adjunct positions with the University of Toronto and the Nortel Institute at the University of Toronto. Dr. Hinton has a PhD in Computer and Electrical Engineering from the University of Toronto (1996).

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