Apr 2016: Ph.D. students attend CRA-W Grad Cohort Workshop

The Department of Computer Science and Engineering recently sent eight Ph.D. students to the CRA-W Grad Cohort Workshop in San Diego, California. CRA-W Grad Cohort is an annual workshop for women in their first three years of pursuing graduate degrees in computer science. The workshop offers sessions that provide career advice for both academic and non-academic career paths, as well as sessions that provide advice for different aspects of students’ graduate school careers, targeted specifically toward women studying computer science and related technical fields. Sessions noted by UNT’s attendees this year as being particularly valuable included "Balancing Graduate School and Personal Life," "Ph.D. Academic Career Paths and Job Search," and "Strategies for Human-Human Interaction."

The workshop also included numerous opportunities for students to network with their peers and with faculty mentors in their own research areas, through highly interactive sessions, Birds of a Feather luncheons where students could share meals with faculty and other students having common research or mentoring interests, and a Friday night dance party attended by all of the students and faculty at the workshop. The workshop also hosted a poster session, where two of UNT’s Ph.D. students, Natalie Parde and Alakananda Vempala, presented the following posters:

• Natalie Parde and Rodney D. Nielsen. (2016). Getting to the Heart of Metaphors: Dependency-based Detection of Metaphoric Juxtapositions. Poster at the 2016 CRA-Women Graduate Cohort Workshop. San Diego, California, April 15-16, 2016.
• Alakananda Vempala and Eduardo Blanco (2016). Complementing Semantic Roles with Temporally Anchored Spatial Knowledge: Crowdsourced Annotations and Experiments. Poster at the 2016 CRA-Women Graduate Cohort Workshop. San Diego, California, April 15-16, 2016.

UNT’s students had a fantastic time attending the workshop and sightseeing in San Diego, and are grateful for the financial support that enabled them to attend. UNT’s students’ attendance at the CRA-W Grad Cohort Workshop was generously funded by CRA-W, the BRAID Initiative, Natalie Parde’s NSF GRFP fellowship, and CSE professors Drs. Song Fu and Rodney Nielsen.

Oct 2015: UNT CSE at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing

In October 2015, the Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) sent 21 students and five faculty members to the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing in Houston, Texas. The Grace Hopper Celebration is an annual conference designed to bring together women technologists and to highlight the contributions of women in the field. The conference includes numerous networking events, career development workshops, technical sessions, undergraduate and graduate student poster contests, and a career fair representing more than 200 companies and universities. This year, the Grace Hopper Celebration boasted more than 12,000 attendees from 66 countries around the world.

In addition to being a Bronze Sponsor for the 3rd year in a row, the Department of Computer Science and Engineering attended the Grace Hopper Celebration as one of only 15 computer science departments in the nation selected to participate in the Building Recruiting And Inclusion for Diversity (BRAID) initiative. As part of the initiative, the department receives $30,000 per year to help implement new approaches to increase diversity, through methods such as expanding local community outreach, redesigning entry-level computer science curriculum, encouraging interdisciplinary collaboration, and promoting community-building student organizations and activities for underrepresented students. In addition to support from BRAID, funding for our students to attend the conference was made possible by generous gifts from Fidelity Investments and the UNT Office of Institutional Equity and Diversity.

Jul 2015: Building, Recruiting And Inclusion for Diversity

The Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) has been a member of the BRAID program for almost one year and has been awarded a second year of funding. Dr. Bryant attended a meeting of the 15 BRAID departments at Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, California, in July 2015, to report our work during the first year, including a training class for prospective teachers of computer science principles, running software testing competitions across a number of high schools, offering a middle school summer camp, and sending students to the Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing.

Visit BRAID Mission, BRAID History, BRAID Progress, and BRAID Commitment pages for further information.