Undergraduate Women Meet Leading Researchers at OurCS Workshop

Friday, October 20, 2017 - by Byron Spice

About 100 female computer science majors gathered at CMU for OurCS, a workshop designed to give them hands-on experience with research.

About 100 female computer science majors from across the U.S. and overseas will gather at Carnegie Mellon University this weekend to attend OurCS, a workshop designed to give them hands-on experience with research.

Nancy Amato, Regents Professor and Unocal Professor in computer science and engineering at Texas A& M University, and Alison Derbenwick Miller, vice president of Oracle Academy, will share their insights on computer science research during the three-day event, which begins today.

OurCS attendants will work on 12 projects in teams guided by scientists from academy and industry, and will present talks on their findings. Organizers hope the experience will motivate the women to consider graduate studies in computer science, a discipline in which women are underrepresented

"This will be an intense weekend of problem-solving for these undergraduates," said Carol Frieze, OurCS chair and director of Women@SCS, an organization that promotes opportunities for women in CMU's School of Computer Science. "Thanks to our speakers, panelists and research team leaders, it should also be an inspirational event for us all."

OurCS is sponsored primarily by Oracle and Google, along with sponsorship from Amazon, Disney Research, Duolingo and a number of CMU entities: Carnegie Mellon Qatar, the Computer Science Department, the Language Technologies Institute, the Machine Learning Department, the Robotics Institute and Women @ SCS.

For more information, Contact:
Byron Spice | 412-268-9068 | bspice@cs.cmu.edu