The 2014 Grace Hopper Celebration (GHC 2014), held in Phoenix from October 8-10, wouldn’t have been a true celebration without the women of computer science from Stony Brook University (SBU).
SBU’s Department of Computer Science (CS) was well represented at the celebration with several graduate students, PhD candidates, and undergraduate students in attendance. The young women from CS who traveled to the conference were: Sherry Shi, Jesmin Jahan Tithi, Ruchi Khandelwal, Sonal Aggarwal, Kavita Agarwal, Marsha Ghose, Soujanya Aithal, Ievgeniia Gutenko, and Rukhsana Yeasmin. One CS graduate student was awarded the prestigious Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship for 2014-2015. Ruchi Khandelwal, master’s student in computer science, received the award during GHC 2014. Ruchi is currently the executive head of the Computer Science Graduate Student Council at SBU.
Three of the PhD students in attendance represented Stony Brook’s Department of Computer Science as scholars, by presenting posters of their research. Jesmin Jahan Tithi, whose advisor is Rezaul Chowdhury, presented her research on High-performance Parallel Cache-oblivious Recursive Dynamic Programming with MM-like Flexible Kernels. Rukhsana Yeasmin, supervised by Steven Skiena, presented her research on Designing RNA Secondary Structures in Coding Regions. Ievgeniia Gutenko, supervised by Ari Kaufman, Distinguished Professor and Chairman of Computer Science, presented on Mobile Volumetric Rendering for m-Health Applications.
“I am very proud of them,” said Kaufman. “It was such an honor for these women to attend the event, just as it was for Stony Brook’s Department of Computer Science to be represented by them.”
Produced by the Anita Borg Institute, and presented in partnership with the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the Grace Hopper Celebration is the largest gathering of women in technology in the world. Some of the celebration’s platinum sponsors included Google, Thomson Reuters, Cisco, Microsoft, and HP.
Throughout the celebration, participants had the opportunity to hear from many distinguished speakers. Among them were Shafi Goldwasser, Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT; Maria Klawe, President of Harvey Mudd College; Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, and Arati Prabhakar, Director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.